


Through a Sunbeam Darkly: Mirror TV Guide Listings for ST:TNG

by bigmisssunbeam49 (Sunbeam49)



Series: Through a Sunbeam Darkly: Mirror TV Guide Listings of ST:TNG [1]
Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:36:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 23,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28965471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunbeam49/pseuds/bigmisssunbeam49
Summary: These are recaps of my 2001 impressions of Star Trek: The Next Generation, created for a group of maidens named ASCEM.  And then it gets complicated.
Relationships: Everyone and everyone
Series: Through a Sunbeam Darkly: Mirror TV Guide Listings of ST:TNG [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2124525
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lene Taylor](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Lene+Taylor).



Forward. Ten Forward.  
These are the c. 2000 ramblings of me, Big Miss Sunbeam, now edited here mostly in the spooky spooky year of 2020. A lotta water under that bridge, eh? The only interest they might have are the old newness of them. I was watching ST:TNG for the first time, and these words were how I felt then. A reader might notice the incessant number of frivolous digressions. Fair enough. But a fan, a real fan, someone whose matrix and reality derives from the little Jean-Luc Picard sitting on her shoulder and constantly reminding her of the meaning of life, cannot help seeing the gossamer connections of everything. Birds sense these glittering synapses of life all the time, ditto insects and fish, and trees, etc.; only humans have lost that sense. Perhaps when God gave humans the ability to name all the things of the earth, humans didn’t realize that the ability to name meant the ability to confine, to separate, to restrict.  
But fandom, in its best form, restores our ability to float freely through the universe seeing all its joins and constructions.  
Because of this ability, fans are spies. They are always on the qui vive, looking for patterns, for recurring faces and words, for tiny gestures which forecast the future of the world. Yes, these fan/spies do often wrangle with spies from some “other side”; the hostilities of warring fandoms are well known. So, if you read these words, you may disagree or find them stupid and artificial and dead wrong, but remember: I am a spy, I walk alone, I work alone, and you can never be sure of whom I am working for.  
These little feuilletons were meant to be parodies of “TV Guide” listings, a popular genre in 2000, but in a way now the virtual lingua franca of the Netiverse (in its limited number of characters). I was aiming these summaries at a very particular audience, a Yahoo newsgroup called ASCEM. I don’t know what those initials mean now: “A Sexy Cohort of Enterprise-related Manipulators”? “All Startrek Cuties out to Entertain Me and everybody else”? Who knows now? These recaps have been edited for clarity and to make myself seem smarter than I really am. Also I am pathologically light-hearted.  
You’ve been warned.  
> Season 1  
> 1\. Encounter at Farpoint. Wherein introduced is the basic strategy of TNG episodes: Things Happen So There Must Be a Plot! So tonight Things Happen while you see the cast warming up to their characters. It's interesting how far wrong Brent Spiner and His Love-Yahweh SirLordPatrickStewartiness (I am not worthy to speak His name) are about their characters, plus Bev is SO hostile! Only Wil Wheaton is actually Wes. Kinda interesting that. Wait, what am I saying? I must be insane! Of course, John deLancie knows EXACTLY what's he doing as Q. U Can't Touch Q! Don't Hurt ‘Em deLancie! (BTW, love the hippy dippy Deadhead who chastises the . . . thing that is doing the . . . thing.) TPTB had no idea what they were doing, did they? Like God at the v. beginning, isn’t it? Must be why Eden sank to grief!  


2\. The Naked Now. A sex virus afflicts the crew, and, as Elvis Presley so tellingly puts it in his “Peace in the Valley”, they are changed, changed from the creatures they am. Since the actors are still searching for their instruments, they make many silly gestures. Deanna calls Will "Bill". Bill. BILL. Jean-Luc clowns around with how much Bev sexually arouses him (boy, he gets over that FAST, doesn't he?) And, finally, Data points out that he's fully functional, thus engendering a boozillion sex fantasies. Not to mention a groozillion teeshirts.  


3\. Code of Honor. Clearly poor TNG still hadn’t found its footing. A terrible episode. Not even 2020 would have an excuse for this racist crap. It starts when Tasha Yar fights a Black woman, and one of them either wins or loses, depending on your point of view. Then we all go to the Big Lot’s version of Wakanda. Also, it looks as if Jean-Luc may not be as good an archaeologist as he thinks he is. At the beginning, he gives the guest actors a sculpture and says in his best RSC way: "Here, you lot, something as primitive as you are! A Sung dynasty sculpture of a horse!" SUNG!!!! When it is so clearly T'ang!! I mean, that's one of those things you learn in remedial Chinese art history! It's like saying, here's an Egyptian mummy from the time of Roy Orbison!!! Fortunately, TPTB get their act considerably together after this. Anyways, order is restored somehow, and a lesson gets learned by somebody.  


4\. The Last Outpost. Here Riker is somehow declared bestest guy in the whole damn world by a TREE! Oh, it turns out the tree is the guardian of the extinct T’kon empire. And, boy, do these extinct T’kons want to get a hold of Riker, who nonchalantly intones, “Fear is the true enemy, the ONLY enemy.” Of course, his only competition is a bunch of Ferengis (first Ferengi sighting, by the way). Poor Jonathan Frakes: he's just crucified by being Roddenberry's Marlon Sue. Hey, I'm not making this crap up; I've done research! Frakes reports that he was told by Roddenberry not to smile the whole first season because GR wanted Riker to get that "midwest Gary Cooper thing" going on. OH REALLY. We thought it was that "midwest piece of wood thing". On a related topic, upstairs in a closet chez Sunbeam, I have one of those Big Cardboard Rikers you used to be able to buy! Everyone here is fond of Big Cardboard Riker; he comes to all our parties, and he helps us out at Halloween too! A couple of years ago as a birthday gift, I gave Mr. Sunbeam a handmade bar guide which I entitled "Put Some Gin In It This Time!" (something I say a lot). Among other things, it contains a recipe for a Big Cardboard Riker; you have to use blue curacao and a little plastic trombone.  


5\. I’m not trying to stir things up but Where No One Has Gone Before is your basic NAMBLA episode. A couple of guys come on board the Enterprise and makes it vroom all over the universe and the vrooming just gets out of hand basically and the scarier one of the two guys, the one named Traveler (not to be confused with Robert E. Lee’s horse) takes a fancy to Wesley and tells Captain Picard how precious and wonderful and Mozartean etc., etc., little Wesley is. It is a mark of how civilized they are in the future that no one openly laughs in Traveler's face. (It takes six years, but Traveler finally nails Wes). Wait! How come I know so much about Robert E. Lee’s horse? It does seem awfully suspicious, doesn’t it? Well, long story short: I graduated from LEE HIGH SCHOOL in like 8,000 BCE, and our annual was called The Traveler (“Say, Aristotle, can I sign your 400 BC Traveler. I promise not to write any stupid jokes about Mrs. Patrocoles being a hetaera this time.”)  


6\. Lonely Among Us. So much plot! My head can hardly retain all this plot. Okay, the plot: basically two races hate each other (they are the Calico Cat and Gingham Dog of races); the episode ends when it runs out of plot, of which there is no end. Everybody, and I mean everybody, gets affected by a “strange energy cloud” and then it all goes to hell until it doesn’t. (Note to TPTB: More sex and ass and nipples and quivering manhoods and so on. And less plot.)  


7\. Justice. Riker and an away team go to the Planet of the Zombie Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders! Bunch of blondes of all genders fetchingly tug at their thong-like outer garments as they welcome our gang. (Many visits to Wig Island [Wig Island! One of my favorite local stores!] went into the making of this ep.) Turns out these new people are hot to trot AND they want to kill Wesley (someone in the front office seems to be working through some issues here). Poor old Jean-Luc has to explain all this to Bev. (Bev seems mildly affected.) Head of Zombie Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders gets on her knees to Picard, but nothing else much happens. Oh, BTW, we get to see God. Worf sums it up when he says: "Nice planet." NICE PLANET! Oh, Worf, you card!  


8\. The Battle. Listless Ferengi plot. See, they have this, like, revenge orb which makes Jean-Luc go mad and get medieval on the Enterprise itself’s ass. This is all before PSHimself realized Jean-Luc *doesn't* go mad. In theory we get backstory on JLP, but none that helps us any.  


9\. Hide and Q. Q wears the hottest outfit in his career, a French Empire kinda thing: I must say, he has a sexy lap. He also tries to seduce the thuggish Riker who just doesn't get it. "Say, Blue Eyes, it's hot, isn't it, and we could play a little game, couldn't we, and let me ply you with alcohol, and what are you doing later tonight?" But Riker is just like, "duh". Bafflingly, Q still grants Riker the power of the Q, so Riker makes a lame attempt to give everybody what they want most. Wesley gets suddenly grown up (he turns out to be the kind of guy who works at Chess King in the mall*), Worf wins a date with Acquanetta the Eel Woman, and Geordi can see! Only Jean-Luc spurns Q, and all of sudden ALL CREATION realizes what Q's getting at. Jean-Luc, for God's sake, man, put out! *I know you youngsters out there are saying: “Chess King? What is that? Has Sunbeam started speaking in Sumerian Fire Oaths, or what?” Okay, just take it from me, Grown Wes is a loser.  


10\. Haven. Wherein we are introduced to the inexplicable gifts of Lwaxana Troi. We also get to meet Wyatt to whom Deanna was betrothed from birth and who has an Etch-a-Sketch hobby. Everybody makes a huge big fat deal about this betrothal, and then it is never alluded to EVER again. (Maybe because Wyatt decides to . . . do something else, like maybe board a plague ship. Well, I guess that’s that.) We also get to see Jean-Luc pretending Lwaxana's luggage is heavy (I love hokey stage business like that, and JLP is good. This little pantomime – Jean-Luc even grunts – is my favorite moment in Season 1).  


11\. The Big Goodbye. Hey, whatever happened to the Ship's Historian? We never see this character, or this role, again! Boohoo! Such a clever idea! At any rate, Jean-Luc goes off to play detective Dixon Hill on the holodeck in order to relieve certain bug-related tensions (the bugs are a tribe of aliens who demand that he speak their pointless gibberish perfectly when he greets them, or else they'll pack up their doll clothes and go home). Not much of a plot premise if you ask me. Nonetheless, Atrickpay Oowartstay *really* earns his Star Trek nickel here. In one fab scene, he's Dixon Hill glaring at the holodeck police goons who are giving him the third degree and then, in the same take, he breaks character and tells the holograms how good they are. You gotta see it! Plus he graces his 1940's costumes with the most heartfelt eleganza. Can you blame Q for loving him so? (Since this is before everyone knew what they were doing, JLP and Bev make plans to go his Dixon-Hill-office and GET BUSY. JLP and Bev tres hot here. He's dying to put his hand on her knee, right under the edge of her rayon hem, and then move that great paw up to the tops of her nylons and toy with her garters while she whispers "no, Jean-Luc, no, we mustn't," but of course she wouldn't mean it. *sigh*)  


12\. Datalore. This is where we meet Super Fantasy Fodder Lore! AND the Crystalline Entity (grrr!) Lore is your classic evil twin: sinister, amusingly effete, and HOT! But, of course, stupid Wesley has to fling Lore into outer space. (Also, stupid Wesley seems to be alone in recognizing that Lore is NOT Data. I guess Wheaton was the only one to read that week's script.) We learn about Data's off switch too. Hmmm, I think I'd like a man with an on and off switch, knowwhutimean? Hey, yall, who's hot for Lore? Is it Geordi? Or Deanna? Tasha maybe? And then who does LORE want most? Riker? Or Cap? Or is it . . . Data himself that Lore fancies? A capital episode!  


13\. Angel One. A planet where Girls' Gym Teachers Rule! Seems these Girls' Gym Teachers capture Riker and put him in a dress and earrings! And then there's some plot. Really really really a lot of plot: there’s platinum, Klingon sniffles, and “say, are those Romulans?”, plot plot plot. Like all the other first-season red-herrings, the fascinating image of an ultra-femme Riker is not followed up in the next seven years. Not to mention that Riker is a complete failure as a woman.  


14\. 11001001 – starring the Bynars! Hello, Bynars! They’re binary, hence the title! Now, for a long time, I thought this was the ep where some problem occurs and so Jean-Luc has to set off a ship-auto-destruct mechanism (so teen-aged-girl petty that I was surprised our captain didn't go to the mall afterwards and shoplift some nail polish). Turns out I was confusing it with this other ep we’ll discuss later. But still a problem DOES occur. And then a solution. Hey, while Riker falls for holohottie Minuet, JLP seems to be there only as background noise. Ho ho. You can tell GR is still fruitlessly grooming Frakes as TNG's resident stud. (Roddenberry really really likes that kitten-faced-boy/angular-man dyad, doesn't he? Riker and Picard. Kirk and Spock. Pike and Spock. Even Pike and Number One. And way back in The Lieutenant with Gary Lockwood and Robert Vaughn. Even way way WAY back to the early 1950's Rocky Jones serial with Richard Crane as the criminally cute pug-faced Rocky and the pointlessly ferret-y Scotty Beckett as his sidekick Winky. (Even if Roddenberry had nothing to do with Rocky Jones, I am sure he watched it!) Say, where is the torn-from-today's-headlines Ph.D. thesis on Rodenberry's deep debt to Rocky Jones? That's what I want to know! Hey you! Quit sitting in front of the Internet and get to work out there!) P.S. The showrunners of “Deadwood” had the same problem. We were all supposed to fall in love with Timothy Olyphant, but instead we girls crawled on broken glass to worship at Ian McShane’s feet. I mean, yeah, sure, we love Timothy O NOW, but it took about eight years, way after “Deadwood” was canceled. P.Double S. I wonder if this kitten/razor blade dyad stems from Rodenberry’s days as a chubby-faced copper “under” hardcore Vulcan-Joe-Friday fascist chief of police William H. Park, whom Rodenberry clearly had a big crush on. Look at the images on Yahoogle if you don’t believe me!  


15\. Too Short a Season. Guy gets young v. quickly (useful skill). There's also a mean alien named Karnas who wants to wreak revenge on young-ing guy. Mean alien is played by soft-core porn actor/producer Michael Pataki. I LOVE Michael Pataki!!!!! His speciality as an actor is the wicked blowhard, all the way from the insulting second-Klingon-in-command in “The Trouble with Tribbles” to the hot ‘n' ultra slashy J.C. in Mystery Science Theatre 3K classic, The Sidehackers (which is where I first fell in love with Michael Pataki). I'm not sure what this episode is about, but I'll probably try to stay old.  


16\. When the Bough Breaks. Starring Radue!!! Studio audience, give a warm television welcome to Radue! See, the plot is that there's a race of people and they have screwed around with nature and so they're sterile and they're really sad but they cheer up a lot after they steal Wes and some other children from the Enterprise and this looks like a good deal for everybody!!! Yay! Especially the studio audience! Radue is the ringleader of this wacky scheme; he is played by Jerry Hardin! Jerry Hardin! He who had a small role in Thunder Road ("And it was Thunder! Thunder! Over Thunder Road! Something something something and white lightnin' was their load!" I love old movies about the hotheaded drawlin, brawlin, lovin, smoochin South, esp. if they have Robert Mitchum in them.) (Jerry Hardin also gets to be in Joe Don Baker movies!) However, the downside of all this is that Jerry Hardin also played the single most irritating character on TNG when he was the wheezy Mark Twain in Time's Arrow I and II. Oh, yeah, Wes and them have to go back to the ship, but somehow the magic faerie of fertility visits Radue's race, so this was another ep with no real point.  


17\. Home Soil. What a splendidly cheap show! Lots of scenes where the cast stares into the camera pretending to look at "dangerous" microscopic creatures. "Look at what they're doing now!" Close-up Bighead JLP says! "Oh, no!" says Close-up Bighead Geordi! "Those creatures are multiplying exponentially," says Close-up Bighead Data! No sex. Although that would be easy to script. Close-up Bighead JLP: "Mon dieu, I've never seen a bigger lovetube!" Close-up Bighead Worf: "Too bad, Captain Picard! Now pull down those drawers!" Close-up Bighead Riker: "Meanwhile, Data, help me hogtie Geordi so I can take out a little thing I call ‘The Midnight Special’ and . . ." (Man, I could write this script all day long!)  


18\. Coming of Age: See, Riker's getting a suntan in the holodeck but he stays in there too long and gets sunburned and so Bev has to give him a big shot of cordrazine and Jean-Luc is wandering around and he says, "whatcha doin' Bev?" and it startles her and her hand jumps and she accidentally injects the cordrazine into Jean-Luc and he goes crazy and starts having sex with everyone in sight, starting with bright red Riker in baggy swim trunks, um, and then Jean-Luc moves back to earth and gets his own series and it's called "Howdy, I'm Jean-Luc!" and his wacky next-door neighbors are played by Suzanne Somers, Lee Iacocca, and Flipper and there's always a moral where everybody learns some sort of lesson and then there's a big final music salute to "Coming of Age"!!! [teeny voice] I'm a terrible Trekkie! I don't have any idea about what happens in this ep! Thank goodness, here in 2020 I was able to look up this ep on Wikipedia (usn’s dint have no Wikerpedia back in 2000). Wikipedia says this was a Wes-heavy ep. See, Wes failed his entry-exam into Starfleet Academy; thus, as he realizes he’s not so hot, he appears to come of age. (I myself think he “comes of age” in season five’s “The Game”, but that is a story for another day.)  


19\. Heart of Glory. To think TPTB didn't hire Dorn fulltime at first, and then he ends up striding two whole series like the Colossus he is! Here, some hot ‘n' leathery Klingons come on board the Enterprise and taunt Worf for being a nelly federation Klingon. He is torn. Eventually one of them dies and Worf gets to growl at the camera to warn the Klingon underworld that the dead are coming!!!! Kool Klingon thing.  


20\. The Arsenal of Freedom. What a great “Twilight Zone” episode! See, okay, lotta plot here (and it's v. ironic!) Species of Vincent Schiavelli-lookalikes invent weapons so clever that the species destroy themselves with the clever weapons. Fair enough. But, in the process of destroying themselves, they also leave a CGI salesman who looks EXACTLY like Vincent Schiavelli who keeps trying to sell the same terrible machines to our gang by showing them how destructive the weapons are. See, that’s the gag or whatever it is. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmoovius. Shakespeareanly clever JLP figures out that the only way to get Vincent Schiavelli to shut up is to buy their stupid program. And he does; so Vincent makes a sale, and then everything blows up! A nice ep! Tasha and Riker get threatened with annihilation! Way to go! (Does Tasha have the eightiest hair in the world or what! Makes you want to shake it one more time for WHAM!)  


21\. Symbiosis. Drug Addict ep. The chief drug addict is played by the actor who was David, Captain Kirk's pretty-boy son. He does a lot of v. pubic acting with his Shatner-esque mouth, and it's a pleasure to see him. Actually, the whole ep is kind of a prototype of Velvet Goldmine only without the music. And without the nudity. And the sodomy is only implied. “Hey, kids, Drugs ‘R’ Bad!!” Wesley, Wesley, Wesley, it’s so much more complicated than that.  


22\. Skin of Evil. Love that title! Okay, now, there’s this horrible villain and his name is Armus and he kills Tasha and he gets Riker dirty and he's got skin of evil and we hate him and they leave him alone and he just a shapeless creature who lives alone in a swamp and he's got no friends and he's crying and he's lonely and . . . oh, no, I'm on Armus' side all the way! Tasha: what is it Shakespeare says! We owe God a death! Get over it, blondingo! (This episode has brought me to tears more than once, and not over Tasha.)  


23\. We'll Always Have Paris. Jean-Luc appears to have had an affair with the cuter girl from the old sixties group, The Mamas and the Papas. Guess he stopped into a church. Guess he got down on his knees to pray. Etc. etc. You get the picture; they'd been in love once [snoresnore] but she married a big cosmic physicist instead. Despite all the potential, kinda boring the way all them early eps is. (You know though, if I knew a guy who had power over Time and Space, I'd have second thoughts about messing with his wife. What was Jean-Luc thinking of?) (BTW, what is the statue-of-limitations on ex-girlfriends? Asking for a friend.)  


24\. Conspiracy. A favorite episode among slashers because of the presence of Walker Keel. See, Walker introduced Jack Crusher to Bev, and, of course, Jean-Luc (theoretically) caused Jack's death but, since Jean-Luc was friends with Walker as well, Walker becomes a key erotic figure in all the polyamory. (Are you following this?) Well, anyway, it’s clear that back in the day that Jack, Walker, and Jean-Luc had some three-way action right out of André Gide. But then Jack and Jean-Luc got a load of Beverly's stuff and that was that. Seems like Walker has been sulking all these years. Uh-oh, “disturbance-in-the-force time”! Special added attractions: giant bugs come out of people's mouths. Plus: Riker eats worms!!! and then this other guy's head explodes! Fun for the whole family!  


25\. The Neutral Zone. Boo! We're Romulans! Beware not only of us but also of our fearsome shoulder pads! Hey, three cybernetically frozen guys from the 1980's also show up; they are meant to be typical frozen guys of the 1980's, to wit, a frazzled housewife, a country singer, and an asshole. The country singer (played by eerie Brechtian hillbilly Leon Rippy more as a hillbilly might be than as an actual hillbilly is) hooks up with Data to go into showbiz together! Speaking of “Deadwood”, the excellent actor Mr. Leon Rippy plays Tom Nuttall, one of the original settlers of Deadwood! I’ll never forget his forlorn admission to Al Swearegen, “I feel lak this town is gettin away from me.” SOB. Also, the avaricious Wall-Streety asshole is an asshole, and the frazzled housewife locates her great great great great grandson and makes plans to go and live with him. This is not a good thing! If my great great great great grandmother turned up from outer space, she would not be welcome, being no doubt much like Granny Clampett, only more primitive and less charming. And even MORE likely to offer marsupial-flavored snacks. By the way, what makes THIS zone so damn neutral? AND WHY ROMULANS? (P.S. There’s a strange thread of resonance between ST:TNG and “Deadwood”. If you search-and-replace your Gem Saloon with “Enterprise” and then do the same with “Al Swearegen” and “Jean-Luc Picard”, I think you can see what I mean. “But, Miz Sunbeam, Jean-Luc never says ‘motherfucking cocksuckers taking it up the ass’ and that’s ALL Al ever says.” I somewhat beg to differ, and I’d like you to think about that for a while.


	2. Season 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A continuation of my frivolous recaps of Star Trek: the Next Generation

Season 2  
26\. The Child. The second season of TNG was tough going for us fans, primarily because TPTB decided to replace Our Lady of Beverly with . . . DOCTOR PULASKI!!!!! ARRRRGGGGGHHH! Did Helen Keller do that casting??? Honestly. Well, back to the plot: aliens impregnate Deanna, she has a child and names it Ian, and Ian just grows and grows and grows until he explodes. Okay, that's kinda different. (Strangely enough, no one ever alludes to Ian ever again. Ever. What's up with that? In real life, people would at least THINK about Deanna's strange child. Does Deanna not want them to? "Cap-TAN, I sense the crew is thinking of IAN AGAN." So Jean-Luc strips down to nothing but a pair of lion-tamer tights, picks up the whip, and says in the sexiest voice in history: "Belay that thinking about Ian, you lot, or taste the whip." Ooooooooohh.)  


27\. Where Silence Has Lease. Nagillum takes over the ship. Help! I'm scared of Nagillum! His head is as big as a horizon! It’s creepy! (I nominate Nagillum for the most terrifying TNG monster!!) Anyways, Jean-Luc decides, rather than to cede control of the ship to creepy Nagillum, to blow it up along with all the people on it. Oh, I see, KING Jean-Luc. L'Enterprise: C'est HIM! No chance of playing along with Nagillum and then fooling him later? No, just le boomboom maintenant, eh, mon frere! (This is the episode I mixed up with season 1’s “101001”, but both eps end up with the enemy just NOT WANTING TO DEAL WITH IT ANYMORE. And who can blame them!)  


28\. Elementary, Dear Data. Buncha Sherlock Holmes stuff with Data and Geordi. Geordi screws around with the holodeck, and Professor Moriarty becomes real and takes over the ship. Moriarty also kidnaps Pulaski "because he wants to." Oh, sure. The uncanny lack of chemistry between Pulaski and everyone else in existence is quite striking; do you think she has like a . . . forcefield going on? Still: Jean-Luc gets to wear gorgeous nineteenth-century togs! As do Geordi and Data (who are a perfect Holmes and Watson!) (And let’s not get started with all the Holmes-and-Watsons which come after 2000. Just don’t. With me.) Two sex points: Sex point A) When Jean-Luc goes to Geordi's quarter, Geordi apologizes for screwing up. The camera shuts down. Jean-Luc says, "now that the camera's off, you must do what you always do when you fail me, Geordi. On your knees and make it last longer this time." Then he fumbles at his waistline while a dot of saliva appears in the corner of Geordi's mouth. Sex point B) The amusingly snippy and affected actor who plays Moriarty is originally from . . . Arkansas!!!! That's right: tell your ma, tell your pa! Moriarty's from Arkansas! Wonder if Bill Clinton tried to have sex with him? Wonder if Bill got state troopers to bring Moriarty to the Razorback Hilton? Wonder if Bill said, "Al, turn yore head! Moriarty, yew are MAHHHHHNNN!" *teehee* (Old joke. Now ineffably tragic. Sorry.)  


29\. The Outrageous Okona. TNG still loitering at the edges of what it could be. Guinan and Data tonelessly discuss "being funny". Then Joe Piscopo does an indescribably tragic turn as a holo-standup comedian showing Data how to be funny. Oh, for God's sake, Gericault's Raft of the Medusa provokes more laughs than these deadly scenes! Some guy who's supposed to be cute (he DOES have a ponytail) turns up directly and does some things. His name's Okona and the best thing about him is that we lovely ladies can slash him with JLP/Will/Worf til the cows come home, so the episode's not totally useless.  


30\. Loud as a Whisper: Deaf Guy and his three backup singers, AKA the Pips, board the ship. The Pips get murdered, and Data has to learn sign language so he can be a Junior Pip. But Deaf Guy says he will make the two asshole species who are at the heart of tonight’s conflicts learn how to communicate with each other by learning how to communicate with him! Yay! This works out tremendously well for everyone. (Except for the first Pips.)  


31\. The Schizoid Man. Disturbing ep. We get to see a corpse. EWWWWW!!!! The corpse's soul possesses Data's body for classic corpse motives: so he can get laid by his surviving pretty assistant! He's like a mad scientist, so, see, there IS a plot. Now, back to your desks. (Wait a minute, didn’t the 1996 movie “Independence Day” borrow this whole Data-channeling-the-dead? Remember? According to Wikipedia, Brent played “Dr. Brackish Okun, the unkempt and highly excitable scientist”!!!! If I ever go in for on-line dating, “unkempt and highly excitable” would be the perfect description for me!)  


32\. Unnatural Selection. Pulaski turns into a horrible old bag. Ah. (Insert your own joke here.)  


33\. A Matter of Honor: Great Riker ep, and slashy as hell! Apparently, Jean-Luc and the captain of a Klingon vessel grant each other most-favored-boytoy status; the Federation get “Klag” and the Klingons get Riker. Lotsa of steamy moments ensue. Riker takes a real shine to lanky farouche Klag who returns the favor. See, Klag's dad doesn't understand him. "Neither does mine," Riker says and bites his lower lip, "but I always wanted someone, a daddy, who would unnerstand me." "I know what you mean," Klag breathes. "Jean-Luc, he's nice ‘n' everything, but he doesn't give me what I really want." Klag swallows, "What do you really want?" "Sometimes," Riker fixes his most limpid gaze on Klag, "sometimes I think I need a spanking.” "Ahh," says Klag, nearly swooning, "you mean, with your pants down.” "Yes," Riker whispers demurely. Wow. You all get the picture. Happy ending! Klag and Riker get married, plus there's bacteria and a comic Benzite!  


34\. The Measure of a Man is just so eighties! I refer of course to the lawwhore who wants to declare Data insentient. She's Phillipa Louvois, overly aerobicized careerbag, and she's apparently being offered up as a role model for real women. She snaps out with her steel jaws, "Jean-Luc, you're the sexiest man I ever knew," which is a genuinely scary moment, but Pee Ess, great actor that he is, doesn't flinch. Then Riker dismembers Data, and we get reminded of the sad little incident where Data slept with Tasha. Anyways, yeah, Data’s sentient.  


35\. The Dauphin. Wesley gets a girlfriend, but, oh, no! she's a shape shifter! Thus revealing TPTB's prejudice in favor of ineluctable-modality-of-the-visible! Their bias towards stasis! "Everybody's great," they say, "and we got, heheheheh, the Prime Directive goin' on, unless a guy changes one little shape and then forget it! Drown 'em in their own lake!" But I paraphrase Melville: who ain't a shapeshifter? I mean eventually?  


36\. Contagion. This ep appears to be all about the set! And there's a terrible virulent computer virus and even Data gets it. So Geordi has to reboot him. That's right! Geordi has to reboot his lover! Is that not so Geordi! The Geordiest! None more Geordi!  


37\. The Royale. Another show about the set! See, there's this planet and they're all living out a vivid fantasy life of gambling and women and meanwhile there's, like, a dried-up corpse upstairs, just lying there! Yuk! But Jean-Luc and them come in and tell the downstairs guys to knock it off. What party poopers! Hey, what's wrong with living in a fantasy world! (Not that we know anyone who would do such a thing!)  


38\. Time Squared. Uhoh! Shuttlecraft accident! Et voila! Deux Jean-Lucs! Not as much fun than it sounds, because the Nouveau Jean-Luc just stares into space! Well! Then they kill the Nouveau Jean-Luc because they don't know what else to do. (If Bev had been there, she'd a known what to do. She'd say, "I believe I'll take Nouveau Jean-Luc to, uh, sickbay for, uhh, experiments." But really she would just lead the bovine newcomer to her pad, plug in some Percy Faith, and GET IT ON.)  


39\. The Icarus Factor. Here Mitch Ryan turns up as Riker's mean daddy. Yeah, the very same daddy who turned out young Will to the mining camps of the Yukon back when Will was the most lissome fifteen-year-old under the Northern Lights. BTW, when I went to my first con (KiSCon way back in March 2001) I thought I was in Heaven! Because SURELY there's a round-the-clock video room in Heaven which shows nothing but old William Shatner television shows! What. A. Trip. KiSCon screened one early-60's episode of *The Defenders* where Shatner played a man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit type who accidentally kills a guy. Well, Shatner has to go on trial, but the defense claims that nobody really liked the dead guy so Shatner might as well be declared innocent (and we all better watch our asses!). Interestingly enough, Joanna Linville, who played the Romulan Commander, is Mrs. Killer-Executive Shatner here. So it’s all Jake, until Mitch Ryan shows up! He's the dead guy's brother and he wants Shatner to FRY! (Ryan must specialize in wicked relatives.) Anyhow, Shatner makes a big courtroom speech ("get a life!" he tells the jury) and then the credits roll. I agree with the jury completely; Shatner is just precious here. Oh, yeah, back to TNG, Riker and Mitch end up pounding on each other with big Oedipal anbo-jyutsu sticks, and nothing really gets resolved.  


40\. Pen Pals. Before Data saves tonight's kitten, Jean-Luc splays those fabulous thighs across a fine piece of horseflesh. Alas, the camera does not linger, but, who cares, Jean-Luc's infinite foxiness . . . is just infinite. See: stupid old TPTB wanted J-L to just be, like, what?, the Obi Wan Kenobi of TNG? Then, back in the day when all the Hollywood bigwigs found out how much WE ladies LUUUUUUUUUUUURVVVVVVVVE His P.S.ness, they started doing all this shit, f'rinstance like giving Daniel Benzali (who he?) a teevee show. "Yoohoo, girls, he's a Brit, and bald, and kinda of temperamental! Now watch this new show of ours; we call it “Cancelled-in-Six-Weeks!" Hahaha! The corporate mind clearly misunderstands the many-throated Cleopatra that is American womankind. Jean-Luc Picard and Only Jean-Luc Picard will do. Now peel us a grape. Oh, yeah, “Pen Pals”. Well, it’s a long story. Data gets radio contact with a little girl on an exploding planet and there’s some tra-la-la and he beams her aboard but that’s kinda un-Prime-Directive-y, so our gang stops the explosions and ship her home. That good enough for you?  


41\. Q Who. OOOOOoooohhhh. Another ep centering on Jean-Luc's thighs! See, there's a bar full of hot men and no women at all! And the most handsome and dominant man drapes his huge thighs across a barstool and says to the prettiest boy there: "You're fascinating to learn about, but next of kin to chaos." And the prettiest boy's wide dreaming poppy-colored mouth opens and he's stunned. Everywhere in America, brains caught ON FIRE!!! (Even if the grammar was baffling.) John deLancie is at his maximum beautifulness here; it's just uncanny. BTW, this ep starts off with the famous (to us) kidnaped-in-a-shuttlecraft scene between Jean-Luc and Q, as meaningfully crafted as a Vermeer.  


42\. Samaritan Snare. Featuring the Pakleds. What's their thing: why, they're dumb as mud!!! It's Star Trek for Dummies! And they steal Geordi because, "He is smart. He makes things go." But our heroes fool them, and they end up returning Geordi. Still I think Pakleds Rule!!! Oh, yeah, this is the one where Wes and Cap go off in a shuttlecraft and Cap tells Wes about his artificial heart. "Would you like to see my scar?" Cap says. WELL! (BTW, you know, back in 2001 we laughed our heads off at the Pakleds and their “He is smart. He makes things go.” But now I think we’d all settle for, yes, just a little “He is smart. He makes things go.” Sniffle sniffle.)  
43\. Up the Long Ladder. Huguenot clones on one side, Irish spacemen on the other. I kid you not. And then Riker gets laid by one of those terrifyingly over-simplified zestful-breastful full-of-life girls that are completely fictional. Lotta arga-warga about cloning, but ultimately Jean-Luc gets all captain-y and marries the clones and spacemen to each other before he zooms off, blithely assuming that THOSE were gonna be some happy marriages. Jean-Luc. Really.  


44\. Manhunt. A Lwaxana ep. Hey, guess what I just found out? (Ole Sunbeam has done her homework.) While researching hillbilly drive-in movies (I have many interests), I found that Majel had a featured role in Country Boy! Yes, the classic 1966 hillbilly drive-in movie Country Boy! Starring Skeeter Davis! And Sheb Wooley! Surely you remember Country Boy? Where the wicked agent discovers the title character singing as he pumps gas and signs him to a contract? Alas, according to the All-Movie Guide, the aforementioned country boy has stage fright, so his agent has to "help him out by dressing him up as Abe Lincoln and getting him to sing rock & roll. The audience is totally offended and the US President personally requests a meeting with the boy's father to try and persuade the lad to give up his sacrilegious act." As they say in the print-humor biz, I am not making this up. Majel plays the part of "Miss Wynn", and, using my enormous Lwaxana-like psychic powers, I believe that means she's the agent's secretary. (Thank God Majel married well.) Oh, yes, back on “Manhunt” Lwaxana grazes on the holodeck for a while. She doesn't seem to quite understand holodecks, BTW, so I must say she's awfully unworldly for a psychic ambassador from outer space.  


45\. The Emissary. Worf's old girlfriend shows up. They go “grr grr grr” at each other. This passes as a plot. (Now, come sit here beside old Sunbeam on my mint-green glider because I want to talk to you. You and I both know that when an “old girlfriend” shows up on a popular television show, she has a thirty per-cent chance of living through the episode. That’s how television works. You can hear the television audience screaming, “Worf is MY boyfriend! Don’t tell me I’m not the first! Stop it! Stop it now!! STOP IT NOW!”) Well, oddly enough, it turns out she lives to another day so she can appear in another episode!  


46\. Peak Performance. Featuring the mandarin and effeminate Zakdorns, with the brilliant Roy Brocksmith as Public Zakdorn Number One! Brocksmith is a great alien; notice how his movement suggests that he might have three or more legs (and why not?) This ep has such a rockin plot: Zakdorns, games, Ferengi subterfuge, Riker fights Jean-Luc, Data learns some kind of lesson. It's got it all!  


47\. Shades of Gray. A slide show! An audiovisual! I used to do this all the time. I’d say to myself: do I really want to go to class and try to taunt that herd of teen Satan-worshippers into giving it up for see-aye-tee-spells-cat! NAWWW, they ain’t paying Sunbeam enough for that, so I'll just prop my feet up and show an AV instead! Hence this show: Riker going into a coma and strolling down memory lane. Plus Pulaski compounds the error. (Yet this very classroom was where I first fell in love with JLP! More on that later.)


	3. Season 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Silly info on a v. serious series.

Season 3  
48\. Evolution. Thanks to Wesley, nanites run amok. See, it's his science project, but it got out of hand! Oh, Wes, you asshole! The director of this episode, Winrich Kolbe, calls this the "kudzu" episode because science goes crazy and does evil instead of good. Not unlike kudzu. What? Yall don't know what kudzu is! When I first typed this, I was looking out my office window at a big ole mess of kudzu, the Japanese plant brought to the American South sometime in the 1940s to stop erosion. Turns out kudzu LOVED the American South, loved it so much it wanted to cover every inch of it with its harmless but excitable vinery, growing an inexorable six or seven inches a night (most reminiscent of the Andrew Marvell line: "my vegetable love should grow vaster than empires"). Say, wouldn't that make a great Klingon name! Captain Kudz'U! “Rowrrrrr! I shall cover your puny home planet with my seed, uh, seedlings! Bwahahaha!” Google that shit if you don’t believe me.  


49\. The Ensigns of Command. Lots of plot, and, amidst it, a mild attempt to establish Data as a heterosexual. No one is really fooled. Oh, I forgot to say that last week's episode marked the . . . (wait for it) . . . end of . . . PULASKI!!! [HUGECECILBDEMILLECROWDWRITHESINECSTACY!!!] See, the previous episode opened up with a slow pan of Ten Forward and then we see Jean-Luc sitting with . . . BEV!!! Bev's back! And she says, "Hi, Jean-Luc, yes, I'm back, replacing that horrible Pulaski." "Well, Bev," he intones, "that's a relief for me, but even more for our studio audience." "Sure enough, Jean-Luc. No more will their ears be assaulted by her fingernails-on-chalkboard voice." "Nor their eyes by her scary ropy face! Huzzah! Guinan, General Foods International Moment Coffees all around. And," Jean-Luc stands up, "I think I'll lead us all in a song of gratitude: [sings] "O come all ye tykes that ply the brine . . . Join in everybody!" etc. etc.  


50\. The Survivors. Or Watch Out For Kevin! Kevin Uxbridge is a strange superpower who slaughters an entire planet of 56 hundred booboozillion souls. Kevin is not my idea of the right name for someone who would do that. Kevin is a pretty small hovering mouse-like name, really. I am KEVIN, destroyer of worlds. Kevin. What an odd choice. Kevin. No slash. Riker gets trapped in a thing and has to hang upside down is about it. Otherwise, no nothing. Kevin.  


51\. Who Watches the Watchers? Old-timey Vulcans have a toe-tapping hoe-down (much to Starfleet's amusement; see, Starfleet is observing this crowd much as you and I might play with our ant farms). Things turn ugly when . . . something happens. The old-timey Vulcans think Jean-Luc is God (a reasonable assumption) and Riker and Deanna have to disguise themselves as old-timey Vulcans, and then Jean-Luc gets a gunshot in the arm. Thus proving there is no God. Sort of. Also, killer dad Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks seems to be Head Ant.  


52\. The Bonding. There's a kid and his parents are dead. Deanna says: well, I'll be up there to talk to you in just a mo! So: is it any wonder that aliens use this poor abandoned little kid as a conduit to the Enterprise? Most unsexy. Worf seems to figure in it. Plot, plot, plot.  


53\. Booby Trap. Featuring Leila Brahams in the title role (raucous strip music and cheers!) This is a typical Geordi episode: he solves an engineering problem and doesn't get laid. Meanwhile, Data (who at times has a weird but unmistakable resemblance to the central figure in Botticelli's Birth of Venus) just stands around waiting. It’s so sad.  


54\. The Enemy. The ep that proves there are no heterosexuals in foxholes. This Romulan helps Geordi, but Worf refuses to help this other Romulan. I guess that’s fair enough. Lotta energy surges, though.  


55\. The Price. Deanna downgrades her choice in men from Riker to Deivoni Ral, who gives her a foot massage on screen! To quote George C. Scott in Hard Core: "Turn it off, turn it off!" Matt McCoy (who has a real gift for slimy creations) plays Deivoni. He's done some curious things in his career: he was in the 90's greatest movie, L.A. Confidential, as the slimy TV cop based on Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey's character). And, since we’re talking about random Hollywood stars, wouldn't Christopher Walken make the GREATEST KLINGON in Federation history!) Since L.A. Confidential also featured the faboo James Cromwell who SHOT KEVIN SPACEY DEAD (I love James Cromwell too!!!) I think Curtis Hanson, the director of LAC, has a little hard-on for Star Trek; he was the director for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle which had Matt McCoy (again) as Annabelle Sciorra's husband and John deLancie as the gynecologist who gropes her. (And furthermore, wouldn't Tommy Lee Jones make the SECOND GREATEST KLINGON IN FEDERATION HISTORY! And because he's Tommy Lee Jones of Harvard, he could play a psychotic Klingon who recites Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot as he psychoes around!!!! "Death is the mother of beauty! Grrrr! We who were living are now dying with a little patience!" Wow! "You have not read The Wasteland until you have read it in the original Klingon!!" SWOOOOnoovius!) By the way, you know what Wikipedia says: “Even though she has fallen for Ral, Troi starts to have some second thoughts about him when he keeps offering her gum and she refuses to try it.” Now THAT’S a plot!!!!  


56\. The Vengeance Factor. Featuring the Hunters, a race of Richard-Gere-lookalikes (hey, CALL MEEEEE!), and their enemies, the fat-Princess-Leia-like Gatherers. Riker gets some from a blond Gatherer, but then he finds out she's really old and so he shoots her. Dead. Ah. My. Well. But she's OLD; what's his HURRY?  


57\. The Defector. Okay, a Romulan defects to the Enterprise. He's kind of an interesting type, slickly handsome with a gravelly voice (played by James Sloyan; TPTB must like James Sloyan as much as I do – he keeps turning up even to the end of Season 7). I imagine that, back on Romulus, he's like a . . . game show host or something, maybe the Romulan Gene Rayburn, hunkered down over his hand-held mike as he taunts the rube Romulan contestants. The Romulan Bret Somers says, "A chandelier," the Romulan Charles Nelson Reilly drawls, "American cheese," and the Romulan audience goes wild. Hey: “Romulan Survey Says:” Wheeeee! Still: seems like our guy commits suicide. I guess being a game show host is hard on Romulans. (Before that, however, he and Bev swap phone numbers. Goodness, doesn't she have the worst luck in men!)  


58\. The Hunted. Crazed Viet Nam vet ep: Military killing machine is returned to Peacetime Planet and he doesn't fit in. Unlike 90 per cent of all deranged televison vets, he isn't played by Martin Sheen (did you know Martin Sheen first play a deranged Viet Nam vet on “The Outer Limits” WAY BACK IN 1963!!!!! I bet you didn’t.) Well, that doesn't really matter, but we do get to see James "Babe" Cromwell in yet another ST role, this time as a pompous magistrate, and Jean-Luc (big advocate for wounded vets everywhere) is quite impudent to him. (No one plays impudent in quite the Heroic/Sophoclean way Sir Big-He P.S. does.)  


59\. The High Ground. Here revolutionaries kidnap Bev. And then somehow kidnap JLP too. And then some other guys too, I imagine. Great Moment: it looks like curtains for Our Gang so Bev crawls on over to Jean-Luc and says, “Jean-Luc, I want to talk to you about something.” And – brilliant – Satrick Ptewart had been lying down, but he does this ballet-type leaping-jacknife sit-up, clearly indicating the terror he feels over Bev confessing her messy inconvenient love. One of the revolutionaries, BTW, falls in love with Bev and does Police IdentiKit drawings of her. Just like a woman: she doesn't care if Che Guevara will take her to the moon and back; it's Jean-Luc and Jean-Luc only.  


60\. Deja Q. Q has loved his Johnny for some time, but Jean-Luc doesn't fall in love with Q til this ep. Oodles of hot stuff: Q naked and "these aren't my colors" and Q spitting out the phrase "little trained minions" at Data as they both march down the halls of the Enterprise! (John deLancie's erotic fury is beautiful to behold.) Then Q decides to commit suicide in a shuttlecraft, and Riker, (oh beware the green-eyed monster, Will!) wants to let Q die, but Jean-Luc stays his hand: saying "I'd hate to waste a perfectly good shuttlecraft." (Which is Startrek for "hitch me to your buggy, Q, lemme ride you like a mule".) SWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNN.  


61\. A Matter of Perspective. Good evening and welcome to Libra Theatre! Where all points of view are valid! Hey, there's a scene in the movie *Giant* where Rock Hudson, Sal Mineo, and Earl Holliman are all sitting around discussing women. Prettttttttttty ironic if you ask me. Something of the same thing happens here when snippy Dr. Apgar (love that name), snippy court martialist Craig Richard Nelson (he was the gay bridegroom in Robert Altman's The Wedding) and the always ambivalent Will seem to accept Missus Apgar as the epitome of hot-momma-ness. Since the plot turns on the point that there's some truth to everything, does this mean that when Missus Apgar says, "first Riker touched my quivering bazooms and then he moved his fierce paw to his own love stem and the next thing I know I was saying yes and yes and . . ." she's telling it true? Hot dog! P.S. At the time, I blithely assumed the actor who played Dr. Apgar, Mark Margolis, was just, you know, another roadside actor. But I was SO wrong: he had a great role in “Breaking Bad” as the indelible Tio Salamanca; Mr. Margolis was so great and so iconic that he just had to be in “Breaking Bad” to make it “Breaking Bad”. Plus, you got to hand it to Vince Gilligan: he also gave Q a sweet sweet “BB” role as well! Go, Vince!  


62\. Yesterday's Enterprise. Champion bestest episode of all time! See, Jean-Luc and them are messing about in space as they always do, and they go through a temporal rift where they're twenty years in the past and the Klingons are mopping the floor with the Federation and it's kind of an AU and everybody's nerves are on edge, and it's really sexy, and Jean-Luc has to snarl at Riker for being such a big freelance pussy, and barkeep Guinan is acting battle strategist (Whoopi is so wonderful; you can see how Guinan persuades Jean-Luc that she's right.) The greatest moment is one which repudiates all you TOSers who say that Jean-Luc is a social worker and a big femme and a girlycow that goes moomoo. At an analogous climactic moment when Shatner just kind of weaves around whining, "Those Klingon bastards killed my son", My Man leaps off the bridge like Nijinsky, says to the Klingons who want him to surrender "That will be the day, cocksuckers!" and proceeds to machine-gun his way back to "real" time. Words can do no justice to this ep.  


63\. The Offspring. Trying to slash this episode is hard because it's DATA'S DAUGHTER! She is so cool! She looks like Snow White! (The casting is perfect: Hallie Todd plays Lal and is totally brilliant: did you all know IRL Hallie Todd is the daughter of the actress who played Millie on "The Dick Van Dyke"? She comes by her cunningness naturally.) Meanwhile, she's a misfit! She works in Ten Forward! She kisses Riker! (Rather nicely done scene.) She dies! Or blows a fuse! Or whatever! This is one of those great eps like Yesterday's Enterprise where so many emotions are present that one is left rather happily drained. But no real sex.  


64\. Sins of the Father. Sob! Sobbooovius! This is the episode with Worf’s brother Kurn and his enigmatic (and dead) father Mogh. See, okay, there’s a rumble in the Klingon homeworld because the rival Duras family is accusing the late Mogh of treachery during the Khitomer massacre. Ah. At any rate, in order to not start a BIGGER rumble in the Klingon homeworld, Worf agrees to be shamed and has to walk the Klingon walk of shame. Which is saturated with shame, believe you me. And you can see why this ep makes Worf fans sad: Our Favorite Klingon is already in deep kimchi with the other Klings because of his human connections, and now falsely accused, disgraced, and a blot on the “Mogh family name for generations” (Wikipedia.) I’m not crying, you’re crying!!!  


65\. Allegiance. Only the anti-Christ doesn't love evil-twin stories! Here we double our pleasure and double our fun with Jean-Luc's alien-synthesized not-so-evil twin, causing all sorts of rather-evil-twin mishaps on the Enterprise, including leading the Ten-Forward gang in a hearty singalong! Since this is the only ep of TNG Mr. Sunbeam ever saw, he thinks ALL episodes of TNG are like this, i.e., that TNG is a musical variety show hosted by Jean-Luc in Ten Forward. "Tonight, the Next Generation Boys and I want to sing Minnie the Moocher for all our friends at home!" (then makes jazz hands!) All that aside, JLP has never looked foxier. And when the synthetic twin puts his limited moves on Bev, I stopped breathing. Oh, yeah, Deanna's alleged "powers" are useless in this episode too.  


66\. Captain's Holiday. I don't want to talk about it. My therapy sessions are continuing nicely: I am allowed two thirty-minute walks a day and one hot bath a week, and, although I still have to use plastic utensils when I eat, the doctor says I'm doing much better. Arrrrggggh!! Fifty of television's most traumatic minutes. Haggard siren Vash creates what must be a clone of Captain Picard who then swanks about Risa in the most amazing swimtrunks in American history while things happen. Meanwhile, the unfilmed truth is that the real Jean-Luc keeps his real holiday aboard the Enterprise reading the Peter Pauper edition of Marcus Aurelius. Hey, Vash turned up about 1998 in an Oil of Old Age commercial playing the MOTHER! Hahahaha! Sunbeam is avenged! (You can see an unbelievable picture of Jean-Luc's swimtrunks on page 43 of the December 1999 issue of "Star Trek: The Extremely Expensive Magazine"; that's the ish with Odo on the cover. You will go thud when you see this photo. Thuddy-thud-thud!)  


67\. Tin Man. Nice title, and the name of the top guest character is Tam Elbrun, which is a pretty cool name too. This is a staple ST plot: we meet an alien sentient intelligence and, uh, in order to . . . uh, deal with it, we leave this week's guest star with it as we zoom into next week, yeah, that's the ticket! (i.e., “Corbomite Maneuver”, “Metamorphoses”, etc.)  


68\. Hollow Pursuits. TPTB fearlessly attack . . . fan fiction! And mighty tepid fanfic it is. Poor old Reg Barclay gets on the holodeck and pretends he’s not a freelance ninety-pound-weakling but a big adventurous man who has big, uh, adventures. He gets to envision Riker as short, Deanna as, uh, receptive, and Data, Cap, and Geordi as the Three Musketeers. Brent, Lavar, and King PS really throw themselves into it, and they look FAB YOU LUSSSS! Anyway, “everyone” talks Barclay out of over-indulging in his fantasy world and they all live happyhappy ever after. P.S. As all of us know, fanfic eventually wins AND HOW, but we’ll just let TPTB have this silly little fantasy about us!  


69\. The Most Toys. I once saw a fan letter bitching about this ep: a gay man, it grumbled, the only time we have an episode about a gay man, he's evil and he kidnaps Data and wants him to run around without clothes on. It took me a while to realize that this was a "bad" thing. I thought it sounded great!!! Face it, Internetties: which interests you more! Data saves a kitten, or Data's kidnaped by an evil sodomite who wants him naked? Oh, yeah, which one would you pay GOOD MONEY to see? I don't think that being Evil is bad. (I possibly need help.) Besides, it's not clear that Kivas Fajo is gay; if anything, he seems quite omnisexual. (I am very sure Fajo is doing drab henchwoman Varria offscreen; she's Alice Kramden to his Ralph.) (Plus great ACT-ING from Brent, Saul Rubinek, and Nehemiah Persoff!!!!! This was one of Nehemiah Persoff’s last roles. I gotta lotta love for this episode; each of those three actors are so, um, distinctive. Face it, I go crazy for character actors, the character-y the better.) (Wait til you see Data imitate the Mona Lisa’s smile: Noonian was an absolute genius!)  


70\. Sarek. Hey, if you don't love Mark Lenard, you are invited to step outside now. (Really, the nerve of some people.) Mark Lenard IS Sarek. He is so handsome and stately and lovely and sexy, and just think of all the hot babes he's had, THREE wives!!!!, man, he just can't keep it in his robes, can he!!!! Here (this is a cool plot) he's got Vulcan Alzheimer's and he's weeping and boohooing and then the whole ship gets infected with it and Wes and Geordi square off making surly tiny sexual accusations at each other, etc. etc., and Bev SOCKS Wes! Yay! Anyway, Cap has to mindmeld with Sarek, which calms Sarek down long enough to complete his diplomatic mission and everyone lives happily ever after!!! (A classically brilliant scene where Picard has to let it all hang out as he expresses Sarek’s repressed memories: not necessarily hot, but acting on a Homeric level nonetheless.)  


71\. Menage a Troi – "Lwaxana Troi, you WILL be mine." A darling little Ferengi gives that line a wonderful reading, and then there's naked Betazoids just standing there, as if their nakedness communicates something (odd, really), and Mr. Homm (I love Mr. Homm) is confused and Riker tries to kiss Deanna and then he beats out those rhythms on a drum-like deal, and the whole thing is mildly shameful, both to watch and to have appeared in, is my guess. (This is the one where Picard flings that massive arm of his out so effectively, the image turns up on everybody’s meme collection. My man!)  


72\. Transfigurations. Is the tale of a strange alien with a wobbly face who gets transfigured and is named John Doe. Well, okay: is this rock star John Doe or John Doe as played by Kevin Spacey in “Se7en”? Oh, neither! Hey, rumor has it that both Bev and Jean-Luc look on John Doe with lust in their eyes (I myself notice that neither one can keep their hands off him). But I hate John's tight-white jumpsuit, though; it's the prototype for Julian's terribly disturbing DS9 racquetball suit.  


73\. The Best of Both Worlds I. Another seed of smut for me: see, Riker and them find JLP's clothes in a drawer. You know what that means? It means he's naked somewhere. Naked. Or even if not currently naked, he WAS naked. The suit is neatly laid out. So he was carefully rendered naked. The drawer is in a public corridor, not off in a closet. So he was naked in public. What a great idea, and it made me just want to claw through the glass of my television screen. (Yes, I first saw this episode on one of them old washing-machine-sized-glass-and-phosphorus teevees, yes, while listening to the Firpo-Dempsey match on my crystal set!) There's also a woman named Shelby and she makes everybody's life a living hell. Then Riker decides to kill JLP, who had turned into a Borg after getting naked.


	4. Season 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Good old Season 4.

Season 4  
74\. The Best of Both Worlds II. “Prepared to be Assimilated!!!!!!” The cry of the ages! BTW, Riker doesn't get to kill Jean-Luc, so the Borgs get to show some muscle until Borg Jean-Luc is captured by us and put in a sort of vending machine-type deal wearing only his Speedos. Why aren't these vending machines everywhere! “Prepare to be assimilated!!” Happy ending. SirKingWonderStewartPatrick acts his Speedos off! “I am Locutus of Borg!” Kazang! Order is restored. Only now has it occurred to me why there’s always plotty-plot-plot in all the eps, (except things like Tasha Yar’s death). Each ending is structured to show that ORDER – duh - is restored. (See, Aristotle and I have this theory about plot, or, all right there’s a lotta death and stuff, but Order Gets Restored Anyway Boom Boom!) (Besides Tasha wasn’t even dead that long!!)  


75\. Family. Well, after that ordeal, Jean-Luc goes back to "France" to see the family. Cool thing: his sister-in-law is Samantha Eggar! Remember her in "The Collector" where Terence Stamp kidnaped her and kept her in the basement and wanted to sleep with her but never did? That movie was the ultimate in sexiness ‘cause, man, she died before they could do it! Wow! And another cool thing: there's a teeny little visual quote from Maxfield Parrish at the end of this episode. Ultimately, Jean-Luc has to tearfully confess to his mean older brother Robert what the Borg did to him. (Mean older brothers are a Star Trek staple.) If I understand him correctly, seems like the Borg held our naked Cap down and one Borg after another had its evil metallic will with his flesh and after a while he got to love it and now periodically he craves semi-metal flesh penetrating his most secret self, etc. And, since we were there with J-L-P, we know what he's saying. SOBBBB!  


76\. Brothers. Brent Spiner, Master Thespian! He acts and acts and acts here! In three distinctly different roles, so it is pretty damn amazing. He plays himself, and his mean older brother, AND his father. He's fun as dad Noonian (although Noonian seems to have visited the same makeup counter as, if you’ll recall, Jar Jar Binks), and, of course, everybody loves mean older brother Lore, that scary scary Lore. Subplot about (can you dig it) mean older brothers – gee, that's different!  


77\. Suddenly Human. "Death in Venice" for Our Captain. Some boy (he's one hot-looking Tadzio) with his pick of inter-galactic sugar daddies keeps nuzzling Jean-Luc. Jean-Luc is tempted, but, when the boy stabs him, he wusses out and sends the boy back to his prior Sugar Daddy. Rats. Best moment: JLP telling Tadzio to turn his stereo down! Who can’t relate to that!  


78\. Remember Me. Wes is screwing around with Time and Space down in the boiler room and somehow makes his mom's universe start to disappear! Actually, this is a very disturbing ep: Bev's alleged universe keep getting [Pee-Wee Herman voice] smaller and smaller and smaller until just about everything disappears. Bev tries to take advantage of these circumstances to make a pass at JLP, but even HE disappears mid-pass. Hey, thanks, Wes! To cut to the chase, it takes annelid pederast Traveler to straighten everything out. And even then Bev doesn't even ground Wes!  


79\. Legacy. Suppose there was an episode that featured Live Underwater Nude Wrestling with Jean-Luc Picard! Don't you suppose the ratings would just GO. THROUGH. THE. ROOF. Paramount's timidity is so baffling. (The only thing better would be Live Underwater Nude Wrestling with Jean-Luc Picard: The Sweepstakes! YOU Could Be a Winner!) This episode, alas, does not feature live underwater nude wrestling with anybody, not even live underwater nude paramecium. It does have Tasha's Live Clothed sister and she does betray Data, but that's pretty colorless compared to Live Underwater Nude Wrestling with Jean-Luc Picard. (Okay, what really happens is something to do with Ishara Yar – though this episode appeared in 1990, it’s still pretty dern ‘80’s!!. Anyway,Ishara Yar is a big traitor and everybody knows it but Jean-Luc forgives Ishara and . . . it ends.) Them Yars is bad news.  


80\. Reunion: Didn’t I tell you Worf’s old girlfriend (from episode 45) was doomed? This ep has so much plot it makes my head spin. Amongst other things, we find Worf has a possible son and the enemy Klingons kill his girlfriend. ‘Cause they’re mean, that’s why! The main takeaway is that Worf’s acceptance of his father’s treachery still hangs heavy on his big brow. Ain’t nobody happy in this one, but I myself find it all very Byronic!  


81\. Future Imperfect. Riker goes into the future! He has a son named Jean-Luc (Riker is a desperately sick man!). He's married to a hologram! Deanna gets a little gray in her hair! (Betazoid Formula would clear that right up.) Jean-Luc (I guess now he's PawPaw Jean-Luc) wears the same kind of beard that the Mayor of MunchkinLand wears! Turns out none of this happened; another ep with no reason to live! So there you have it!  


82\. Final Mission – For reasons lost in the mists of time, deranged loser takes Jean-Luc and Wes for a ride in his Outer Space 1975 Orange Pinto! They crash (natch!) in a desert, but Jean-Luc-the-Fabulous sets about conquering the elements pronto. You must see Jean-Luc in his improvised French Foreign Legion hat. Ooooooooooooooooooohh, he looks wonderful. Too bad he nearly dies, and only Wes is there to save him. Doesn't matter. The main thing here is Jean-Luc in his improvised French Foreign Legion hat. Too beautiful for words. Sleek as a cat. Hot as a coal. Meaningful as a promise.  


83\. The Loss: Does Deanna really have a job description, or is she just the Captain's exotic arm candy? Maybe she's part of some lend-lease thing with the Betazoid government. Well, anyway, in this ep, something happens (photon photon photon bullshit) and she loses what little ability she has. "I can't read minds anymore, CAPTAN," she says, but she seems to get her "powers" back at the end. Rilly.  


84\. Data's Day – a fluffy widdle epistolary episode about Data's day! Just like a child's book where everybody is perfectly cute and well-behaved (except for a naughty-faced Romulan girl subplot. Shen pretends to be a Vulcan and then does some mischief. Data delightfully goes full metal Sherlock to determine she’s a bad bad Romulette). The main point is Miles and Keiko's wedding; Data takes dancing lessons from Bev and learns this very troubling human thing: you can dance alone with all the ease in the world, but, when you have to have a partner, that’s when church lets out! *sigh* BTW, you can tell O’Brien and Keiko’s marriage will end with them clawing at each other eight years later. Tonight, Keiko points out she must be Irish too; after all, she's sharing her bed with a pig.  


85\. The Wounded. Tonight's Special Guests: Those Wacky Cardassians. Although many fans have commented on TPTB's obsession with humanoid-looking aliens, these consistently humanoid aliens don't particularly bother me. Except for the eyebrows: aliens always seem to have rococo and byzantine eyebrows. Hey, what makes eyebrows a universal constant? "Breathes there a race with souls so dead/ they don't have eyebrows coming out of their head?" I mean, we humans probably have more in common with ducks than with, say, Klingons, but ducks don't have eyebrows. Or do they!? Well, anyhow, leaving eyebrows out of it, the thing I want to know is how come aliens are always so proud! And sneering! I mean once in a while you see some craven aliens scurrying about, but those two extremes are it: proud or humiliated and craven, no in-between. Never a pleasant game of cards; never going to buy alien patio furniture; never arguing over the right way to make alien potato salad; never a kindly old alien guy fishing philosophically in a little alien pond. No middle ground for the aliens, nosireebob! So tonight, Colm Meaney is cool, but mainly the Cardassians get haughty on Starfleet's ass.  


86\. Devil's Due. A good ep!!!!! See, okay (deepbreath) there's this sad little planet and they're all reading copies of Intergalactic Left Behind and they just know the end times are at hand and then a hot babe shows up and says, "that's right, it's the end times and I'm God!" And the saps buy it! (Losers!!!!!) Ergo, Jean-Luc and them have to persuade A WHOLE PLANET that she's not God. Ooh, one night, the God gal sneaks into Jean-Luc's bedroom, and we get to see him strut his stuff magnificently in his jammies! MMMmmmm. Make a statement, space jammies!! Also a nice hot moment when she says I know the nookie you need and turns into Deanna!!!!!!!!!! Oh, my petunias!!! For those of us into Klingon trivia, Feklh'r, the Klingon Satan, turns up and growls at the cameraman!  


87\. Clues. Tonight there's a lot of clues! I actually find this ep sort of irritating. Everybody seems a little out of character. *sigh* Why are there no TNGs about, you know, Moonies!? Or flubber! But no, we get this. Things happen. Hey, wouldn't a website devoted to weird symptoms be a great thing? It could be like "Do You Have Leprosy! Take This Test and See! Maybe It's the Bubonic Plague! Or Rabies! Or Lockjaw! You Never Know What Those Strange Symptoms Could Mean! Find Out Now!" Just think of the billions in advertising this site would make! I know I'd go there EVERY DAY! Just to be sure! I seem to be drifting off-topic. (If only Sunbeam had patented that idea, she’d be a rich gal today! Because the Into-net is filled to the gills with, like, Symptoms-R-Us, Whatcha-Got-Yaws?, Doctor Doctor Tell Me True Do Ghosts Really Say Boo!! etc. etc. Each and everyone of us our own little Dr. Greg House. *sigh* Lesson: Never dismiss an idea, guys!) Okay okay: I’ll knock it off. What happens here is, well, it’s complicated. There’s this wormhole, okay, and our guys leave it and, although Data says we were only in the wormhole for a parsec, really, cross my electronic heart, there’s “Clues” that tell the crew they were out for longer than that. Stuff happens: Evil race, Deanna’s possessed, Picard challenges Data, Evil race says the hell with it, the clues all disappear, everybody is restored to some timeline or other. So: CLUES!  


88\. First Contact. Not the movie with James "Babe of Babes" Cromwell, but the episode with Caroline Seymour (spending too much time on the intergalactic treadmill, but still cool) who believes in aliens! Turn out she's right! They exist! And . . . they're us!!! Us, I mean, we decide to postpone coming out of the alien closet on this planet till the planet can handle it, but we do get a lovely parting gift in the personage of Caroline Seymour herself! (Abducted by something very like aliens! What luck! To be abducted by aliens is my husband’s fondest wish, and mine too!) George Hearn (played a great "Sweeney Todd" on HBO eons and eons ago) is a doctor who tries to “help” disguised-alien Riker. (And, for us guttersnipes, there's a risque interlude with one of those porn staples, a white-stockinged and sultry nurse; seems she wants a taste of Riker's alien love-tool.)  


89\. Galaxy's Child. Star Trek's answer to Bambi! They kill a gigantic space creature's momma, and the space creature begins to nurse the Enterprise and steal its energy, and Geordi conjures up the spirit of Leah Brahms (I think) and there's a happy ending. Still, hurt-animal stories do a number on me.  


90\. Night Terrors. Nobody's getting the sleep they need and everybody is tired and cranky and Bev is too tight-assed to give them the Valiums and Percodans and Hycodan they so obviously need, so the night-terror monsters come to life in sickbay to get Bev for being just plain mean and unreasonable (it’s pretty damn spooky too. Just show me corpses covered with sheets who start to sit up, and I am out the door). Oh, and Deanna pulls her weight for once and solves things.  


91\. Identity Crisis AKA Big Blue Geordi! He turns blue! He has turquoise veins all over his body. If you look close enough, you can see the perfect copper coins of his nipples! And the promising folds of his underarms! Pretty sexy, for something with that color scheme. See, there were these people who went on an away mission several years earlier who are now turning into these rainbow-hued critters. And thus our gang has to go over the records of that mission to figure out what went on so they can return Geordi to his original Geordiness. There's something slightly unsettling in the way they go over the records again and again and again, just like the Zapruder film.  


92\. The Nth Degree. Barclay eps are generally pretty cute; this one is slightly less cute, but it does address the issue of Space Tedium!!! Yes, it can be tedious in outer space! That's okay, says Bev, we'll put on a little play! Yup, the cold wind of Borg breath is at our back, so we'll start a community theatre! (When has community theatre ever solved anything!! And I speak from experience! ) And then Barclay takes over the known universe until he folds like a dimestore envelope.  


93\. Qpid: Despite the depressing presence of . . . VASH, she-who-rimes-with-trash, this ep is pretty hot. And probably as close to canon slash as TNG is going to get. Jean-Luc puts on his jammies and gets in bed and, in a sudden flash of light, Q appears on the bed with him. Q says, "you seem. . . smaller" (fabulous significant emphasis). Q says, "I didn't know she'd have that sort of effect on you." Q says, "I should have appeared to you as a woman!” Then he has the effrontery to steal Vash from JLP and take her away. (Q really doesn't want her; if he turns his head, he can't remember her harsh-and-spiky features, but he also doesn't want her to lure Jean-Luc into her fatuous traps any further.) Great costumes in the allegedly-comic Robin Hood subplot. Jean-Luc wears tights, and no one in the history of the world wears tights as well as he does (I'll give Vash this: Jean-Luc dresses hot when she's around). Q looks real sharp too as the Sheriff of Nottingham, and they are both so beautiful and alluring and they send so many melting glances towards each other. Why Does Vash Live? Why Does Vash Live At all? What Is God Thinking of? (BTW, this is where Worf utters the lapidary phrase: “I am NOT a merry man.” Preach it, bro!)  


94\. The Drumhead. Another courtroom show. Notice how cheap they are: get some ham actors and some tables and a big bunch of script and go to town. This mess all begins with a guy with bat-like ears who says his grandmaw is a Vulcan, but really she's a Romulan. His Royal Shakespeare Majesty PeeEss gets to act and act and act, but there's a little more script than there ought to be.  


95\. Half a Life features the guy with the popular designs on his head. How popular are these designs? Well, down where I am, all the hillbillies I know have these very same designs airbrushed on the hoods of their Pontiac Trans-Ams. Although this doesn't help tonight's guest star at all. Seems Lwaxana's in love with him, and he commits suicide. Oh. (We get to see her call Worf "Woof" for the first time – Dorn coulda stopped that if he'd piddled on her leg just once). See, the guest star HAS to commit suicide; it’s a planet rule! All of them have to commit suicide at the age of sixty cuz that’s how his people roll. (Sunbeam looks at her watch!!!)  


96\. The Host. The Trill ep. This is great but confused. Great because a woman comes on to Bev! Great because Bev does the wild thing with Riker (when he's possessed by the Trill)! Great because Riker nearly dies! Confused because the initial Trill Bev falls for, is, sigh, not an attractive piece of manflesh. Confused because the Trill inside the unattractive piece of manflesh is even less attractive – it looks like a cow's stomach! Confused because Bev says to herself: “I'll just put this cow stomach inside Riker and that way we can have sex!” NooOOOOOoo! Somebody get this woman a "Good Vibrations"* catalogue quick! (*To add to your store of useless knowledge, ”Good Vibrations” catalogues were sex toy catalogues for gals of the past, but now that even anteaters can order fringed and beaded anal plugs off the Inpervernet in milliseconds, my jest loses its frisson, I believe.) Oh, the cow stomach ends up inside a WOMAN . . . and TPTB chicken out, just like that.  


97\. The Mind's Eye. Filmed in Fabulous GeordiVISION! All right, let's all leave aside the smut moment and live up to our IQs for a moment and talk about BIG SMART STUFF. So why didn't Noonian Soong program Data with visual-filtering programs? I mean, Adobe can do it; they can take a picture of your cat Fluffy and make it contrasty or pencil-ly or water-color-y or sepia-toned or done in weird complementary Andy-Warhol-like colors and just overall make the Fluffmeister look too cool!!! So why can't Data adjust his vision to something a little out of the ordinary? (And his vision must be ordinary: think about his paintings.) Can you imagine watching TNG one night and *poof* there's a solarized pointillist Worf! [BEAM!] Too great an idea! Anyways, what sort of happens is that Geordi gets all brainwashed and becomes a Manchurian-Candidate and tries to kill Miles! Makes me miss Angela Lansbury and James Gregory (he dressed as Lincoln in “The Manchurian Candidate”, but did you know James Gregory was the first actor to play President U.S. Grant on “The Wild Wild West”? I have a v. soft part in my heart for “The Wild Wild West”). (I’m going to have to face this about myself: I like to watch men mix it up in small spaces.) Anyway, everybody gets healed and stuff.  


98\. In Theory. I wonder why there's not more fanfic about Jenna D'Sora. She's perky and blonde! And way hot to trot! (Hey, it's pretty clear she and Data DO IT that night on the sofa.) But, alas, Data understands love no better than any of us, and so Jenna is elected mayoress of Lonelytown once again. We also get far too much information about Miles' dirty socks.  


99\. Redemption. Klingon sisters to the late bad guy Duras, B'Etor (or is it Lursa) makes moves on Cap. Pretty steamy, if you ask me. "Let me reheat your Earl Grey," she breathes. "Oh my goodness, what a huge teacup you have!" There's also a lot of Klingon rodomontade, Gowron gets to Gowron around, and, right after Worf hands in his commission, he gets elected Homecoming King of the Enterprise Harvest Ball. (I love Gowron: what a gift dem eyes are!)


	5. Season 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 5: You gotta love it!

Season 5  


100\. Redemption II. Now Lursa (or is it B'Etor) turns her dark and mighty attentions to Worf. Worf looks absolutely stunning in Klingon drag, but there's just so much plot, and it's all Klingon plot. Seems like Jean-Luc and Gowron start dating during this episode. Oh, yeah, Kurn and Sela show up, as mysterious relatives of Worf and the late Tasha Yar. And, *pour resumer*, Worf is fabulously moral and the Bad Klingons are v. bad.  


101\. Darmok. This is one of the coolest episodes in TNG history. Captain Dathan (for it is he) is not the cutest thing under the sun, but he and Jean-Luc end up together and in peril on some planet. So they bond. Sort of. Then he dies. BTW, Jean-Luc shows off his very nice-looking new jacket. (See, the thing is that Dathan’s race only communicates in something like metaphors, or analogies. Lotta ink has been spilled over this ep, and now, in our weird times, Dathan has won quite a following for his metaphysical linguistics. Because, see, metaphors work. “Shaka, When the Walls Fell” means “big disaster”, and “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” means “let’s become sidekicks, good buddy!” before they get beamed down to defeat, you know, some sort of menace.) NOW everyone is saying how cool it is that Dathan communicates in metaphors. I wish I was smart so I could think of some metaphors. But I’m all like, “Elvis, When He Filmed ‘Clambake’!” I’m either no good at this or, possibly, metaphors are the only thing we speak in now and I am too dumb to know it. Which is a good possibility. (BTW, Paul Winfield, whom I love, played Dathan. So: SWEET!!!! Or, to use a metaphor, “Elvis, On his 1969 Comeback Special”!)  


102\. Ensign Ro. Fresh meat Ro Laren boards the Enterprise and Riker is jealous of her bewitching hold on JLP. Still, bewitching tho' she is, she's a Bajoran, and thus hard to whip up any interest about. See, I bitch and moan about aliens being too damn alien and along comes a species that's all too human and what do I do? I GET BORED! Because I am heavy bored by Bajorans. And you know why? Because they don't have one single characteristic! The two main Bajorans we know, Ro and Kira, are sad little victims who are spitfires; I’m not saying it can’t be done, but . . . To tell the truth, a great deal of my earlier life was spent trying to think of amusing japes to put smiles of the faces of you, yes, you, the rhapsodic rainbow of lovely ladies who used to call yourselves ASCEM. So I had meant to tease you with the idea of a Bajoran teevee show. But what would it be? A Bajoran Bonanza? A Bajoran 60 Minutes? A Bajoran Waltons? See how utterly plausible those are? Bajorans are as boring as humans! (Contrast this with my other offering: the Klingon Andy Griffith Show! Does that not rock! The Klingon Gomer! The Klingon Goober! The Klingon Barney! The Klingon Floyd the Barber! And, of course, the Klingon Aunt Bee!!!! Or would it be Aunt Be'E!) That being said, I loovvve Ro; she is so gorgeous. And I love (a little more mutedly, but still) Kira. And I especially love the plump-armed tender-voiced Kai Winn-Ratched as so enchantingly embodied by Alabama’s own Louise Fletcher. *sigh* There's probably a point here, but I don't know what it is. BTW TIL Louise Fletcher is SIX FEET TALL! Whoa!!!!  


103\. Silicon Avatar. Great title. Riker chases a woman. And, NO, she did not have big breast implants and thus get nicknamed the Silicon Avatar. Now get your minds out of the gutter.  


104\. Disaster. You have shows for weeks where nothing happens and then there's something like this and everything happens: Data accuses Riker of wanting his body! Keiko goes into labor in Ten Forward! Worf says to her “you may deliver!” (Calling Dr. Klingon! Calling Dr. Klingon!) And Jean-Luc is trapped with (the horror the horror) THREE child actors!  


105.The Game. THIS IS THE MOMENT, to paraphrase that song from “Jekyll and Hyde”. Because this is when I first realized hot sex could happen on TNG. Worf and Will are holding Wes's knees apart, and Jean-Luc is leaning over him to ready him for playing their wicked game. (Which involves things with large heads popping up and is followed by the soft orgasmic sigh of the players.) As I watched this, my eyes literally jumped out of my head and walked around the room trembling. I could not believe it: I was staring in the heart of sex, damp and breathless. That JLP didn't actually pull it out and make Wes take it like the little bitch he is . . . is just irrelevant! (And no surprise that the lush and pneumatic Ashley Judd was hovering on the perimeter.)  


106\. Unification I. Whoa! Brilliant bedroom scene between Jean-Luc and Data. Data's got his back turned to Jean-Luc and keeps rather insistently peeking back at JLP over his shoulder. Jean-Luc tosses and turns, aware that Data's heated gaze is upon him. You say: so what? Well, just imagine this scene were in a James Purdy novel. See? Wow! Jean-Luc is on the verge of inviting Data into the bed with him when something happens. Bev also changes Jean-Luc and Data into Romulans (PEEEEEE-ESSSSS is the cutest Romulan imaginable: just gorgeous) (and Data's not bad either). (Bow down to Sunbeam! After all, I own both Playmate action figures: Romulan JLP and Romulan Data!) I find it very cool that the captain of the Klingon sex-vessel they ride in is played by Stephen Root. I love Stephen Root: he was the weird blind disk jockey in O Brother Where Art Thou. An amazing performance: his line readings there are the freshest ever. That was back in the now unimaginable 1990. And now, here in 2020, Stephen Root is the coin of the realm!!!!! I just watched his brilliantly greasy performance in “Perry Mason 2020” and his luster only increases with each viewing.  


107\. Unification II – Okay, our boys get to Romulus. Sela seethes around, and Pardek's there too, looking like a Surinam toad. Lot of double-crossing. I had some hopes that the cute Romulan would turn out to be their Gorbachev (a hot item in the early nineties!) so things might get interesting on Romulus: no luck. But the main thing is SPOCK!!!! According to gossip, the goon TPTB producers felt Nimoy played Spock as too zoned out. Well, screw ‘em! Clearly, Spock and Kirk have had a terrible falling out; Kirk's gone off and married Antonia, but, before he and Spock could make up (the fondest wish of each of them), Jim's killed on the Enterprise B, and Spock tries to channel his enormous grief into patching up things with the Romulans. The mood he radiates to me is best summed up in "Monody", a poem by Herman Melville about Nathaniel Hawthorne:  
To have known him, to have loved him  
After loneness long;  
And then to be estranged in life,  
And neither in the wrong;  
And now for death to set his seal –  
Ease me, a little ease, my song.  
*sigh* And neither Jean-Luc nor Data, fresh as they are, can replace his ineffable Jim.  


108\. A Matter of Time. Okay, there's this guy, see, and he says he's from the future and he's doing a random sampling of the past and he wants everybody to fill out questionnaires (to which Worf says: "I HATE QUESTIONNAIRES" thus restoring everybody's faith in his Klingonness). Max Headroom plays the guy and he's pretty animated, so that's okay. Jean-Luc tries to taunt him into revealing the future and he won't and then Max and Bev have an elephantine courtship and it turns out he's not from the future, but the past! Well! My word! Data has some cute moments; Monsieur Headroom wants to take Data back to his world as a sort of living souvenir, much as you or I might take a cutting from the begonias in the parking lot of Graceland (well, *I* did anyway.) No dice, you lyin’ alien!  


109\. New Ground. The camera swoops down on louvered doors which open to reveal Worf standing there in a lovely chiffon creation. "Welcome to this Week's Klingon Playhouse!" he intones. Tonight Worf goes all wussy when his foster momma brings back his son Alexander. It doesn’t go well. Alexander steals a lizard (I think) and is ratted out by his schoolteacher and then the schoolroom catches on fire and Riker and Worf (hey, Alexander has two daddies!) rescue him! Well, looks like Alexander is here for keeps. I bet Jean-Luc LOVES that.  


110\. Hero Worship. Another one of those ABC Afterschool Specials where Data saves a kitten, uh, boy. It's a perfectly nice episode: Data paints, Brent acts, Enterprise zooms. Plus, you know, warp warp warpy power. Brent even tries to pretend that he is lifting an amazingly heavy beam and does not, despite his enormous theatrical gifts, convince us. But I have to quote Mystery Science Theatre 3K: is this touching? Or boring?  


111\. Violations: Riker seduces Deanna!!!! Worth it, worth everything just to see Riker seduce Deanna! Why have a monstrous piece of manflesh like Frakes around if he's not going to get some action! Turns out it's all a dream. Or something. Hey, in another dream, Jean-Luc puts on a hairpiece and floats around Jack Crusher's body. Are the ship's stores contaminated with ergot? Nope, it's just the Ullians, that fun-loving brain-wavin' race who have calamari glued to their temples. A most amusing people: when they aren't imagining having other people having sex (hey, wait a minute!) they wear Family Dollar mops on their head! JLP's hairpiece is much more plausible than those mops, but it is odd how the hair diminishes his handsomeness. His beauty is as pared down as that of the pyramids, and they certainly don't need toupees.  


112\. The Masterpiece Society. Moody lethargic master race (which seems to consist of TWO people) has its own planet. Deanna fools around with one of them, and Ron Canada is the other one. Canada played Iago to Lord High Pee S's strange color-reversed Othello in Washington D.C. years ago. I think that version of Othello is boiling up on the surface here; among other things, Jean-Luc is furious with Deanna for shacking up with the other guy. You little whore, he seems to say, I can't leave you alone for five minutes without your giving it up for the mailman and the mailman's dog. Then he snarls, take down those panties, bitch, Admiral Spanky is docking here tonight. *Sigh* That one scene makes this a reasonably nice ep.  


113\. Conundrum. Oh, no! An episode with MPD! Yes, the Three Faces of Ep! A) It's a comedy! Uh-oh! Those zany Enterprisians have all got amnesia! Jean-Luc thinks he's Riker, Worf thinks he's Jean-Luc, and Data becomes the new Guinan! B) It's a rompdeelyicious sexfest when outer space's sultriest babes turn up two at a time in Riker's lustpad! C) It's a searing indictment of man's inhumanity to man when the crafty Sataarans enlist the forgetful Enterprise crew into slaughtering the Lysians! A deeply strange episode. Oh, I love this though: see, the crafty Sataarans plant a faux first-officer who lures the crew into his scheme. He fools everybody too, and you know why!? Because he embodies the two basic characteristics of first officer-tude – he's both Doughy and Wooden. (Riker, Chakotay, and Mike Pence: Doughy Yet Wooden. Wooden yet Doughy. You Know I'm Right.) (Not to mention Al Gore!)  


114\. Power Play. Where's Colm Meaney's Oscar!!!!!! What a great actor! Okay, he's no Big Lord HimalayaKing Stewart Patrick, but he's still great. In this one, evil, like, lightning bugs take over the souls of Colm, Deanna, and Data and make them mean. Gotta say: Colm, Deanna, and Data are satisfactorily mean. They make everybody go to Ten Forward where Colm is particularly menacing! But brutal as those lightning bugs are, they are essentially . . . lightning bugs and just about that bright. Jean-Luc talks them into flying away. Jeez, Jean-Luc, how hard can it be to outwit lightning bugs!  


115\. Ethics. Worf dies. See, he's messing around down in the storeroom, and a big can of elements falls right on top of him. This paralyzes him and he has to wear shiny fab Pajamas of the Future and he decides to kill himself because he's paralyzed and . . . something happens, I forget exactly what, but it doesn't really matter, because, even though he dies, he still snaps out of it!!! Seems Klingons have redundant anatomies! Dog my cats, is that handy or what! Worf does have an extremely slashy moment when Riker comes to say good-bye, Riker whispering that he's going to miss the thundering beef of Worf's big one and he doesn't know what he'll do now (probably just become the most prized boy whore on Deep Space Umpteen – where a wandering Klingon sings, *Riker, you're a fine girl, what a good wife you'd be, but my life, my love, my lady is the Klingon homeworld dootdootdootenydoot*), and then Deanna comes in and seconds those emotions. But, since Worf snaps out of it completely, there was really no point to this episode WHATSOEVER!  


116\. The Outcast. It fries my doughnuts in the worst way when TPTB decide that, if the audience wants gay action, we'll give them gay action, but it will be in the form of WOMEN ON WOMEN. Oh, for God's sake, ALL I WANT TO SEE IS BIG HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STARS GET THAT BITCH THANG GOING ON (BUT ONLY IF THEY ARE MEN.) DS9 was the worst with all its so-called lesbo eps. Yawnoovius. See, in this ep Riker hooks up with an androgynous phys-ed major from another planet named Soren (the phys-ed major, not the planet). But the King of All Phys-Ed Majors doesn't want Riker's seed despoiling his minions, so some things happen. Boring Soren and Riker have an unhappy ending in that Riker doesn't get to spend the rest of his life with this piece of cellophane. And Sunbeam blows a raspberry.  


117\. Cause and Effect. Foxy ep. Ship blows up every twelve minutes. Bev looks at a plant. BOOM! The usual gang plays poker. BANG! Jean-Luc thumbs through a book! CRASH! Through the crafty science of script writing, they finally figure out that they're going to blow up at reasonably predictable times. SMASH! Yeah, the end is near and nobody rushes to get laid! (What the hell does Starfleet put in its food!) CLANG! Happy ending! KERBLOOEY!  


118\. The First Duty. Wes screws up and it's supposed to be a big deal. Well, a guy does get killed, and Wes and some other cadets try to lie their way out of it. UNTIL Jean-Luc fixes his truly steely eyes on Wes who folds like a dimestore futon. One of the other cadets is Nick Locarno, the prototype of Tom Paris (I always thought that Robert Duncan McNeill had a fugitive resemblance to Lee Harvey Oswald). (Odd, now that I think about it, Ed Lauter plays the dead guy's father in this ep and I always associate ED LAUTER with Lee Harvey Oswald too! Ed starred in 1973’s"Executive Action", about JFK's assassination; old Ed was the REAL assassin, you know, the one over at the grassy knoll). (Of course, I'm probably influenced by the fact that Robert Duncan McNeil and Lee Harvey Oswald both have three names. Then again, I don't confuse with them with David Lee Roth. Or Pliny The Elder.) BTW, all the Sunbeam clan love it when Boothby says: "Jean-Luc, what happened to your hair?" (I bet we still say this to each other about twice a month).  


119\. Cost of Living. Horrid Lwaxana ep. First off, there seems to be an attempt at "fun" on the holodeck with a liberated colony of free-living 1950s Big Sur types. Shudder. It's the kind of "prepackaged" fun of a Chuck E. Cheese. Lwaxana keeps threatening to doff her duds! And then she does! And gets into a hottub with Worf and Alexander and some others! Since Lwaxana's mere presence has the weirdest dampening effect on everybody's sexuality, what is the point of this grim scene!!? Flaccid hot tub scene, listless nudity. BTW, if Riker were to attempt that whole hot tub/naked dancing thing with Alexander, Congress would be passing "Alexander's Law" quick as bugs. Sexism, pure and simple.  


120\. The Perfect Mate. First ep of any Star Trek I ever saw. (Ah, I remember it well; I was in an Atlanta hotel on a rainy Saturday in August 1992 – we were taking little Susie Sunbeam to Six Flags before school started back up – and, well, I immediately knew which way my heart was headed.) In this ep, well, lotta stuff happens, but mainly there's this alien sex-o-morph named Kamala (!!!!!) who is affianced to a weird tribal king but she gets prematurely unwrapped by Ferengis and, after cruising all the available male personnel, she falls in love with *surprise surprise* Jean-Luc Picard!!! There's an incredibly sexy scene the night before JLP has to give Kamala up to the weird tribal king. It's clear she wants it, he wants it, but they can't have it. Odd that fandom hasn't played with this very much. And the shocking thing is that she's not inappropriate for him! Unlike Jenice and Vash and Phillipa, she doesn't repel! She seems pretty cool. Sure, Bev's steamed but as much by the implicit prostitution of the whole situation as anything else. (My theory about that night together is that Jean-Luc and Kamala play teen games: we won't go ALL THE WAY. So there's ooooodles of hot tongue action and finger play and alternate but nonetheless effective orifice usage. No cell of the other's body is left unstimulated. Jean-Luc can barely walk and his skin is surprisingly chafed and tender. Kamala made it clear to him even as he plunged helplessly for the last time into her amazingly tender alternate-nether flesh that she would fulfill her duty of marrying that little alien king in his leopardskin pillbox hat. Jean-Luc mournfully accepts this.) At one point, when Kamala gets Riker all hot and bothered, he says he's going on up to the holodeck. Does that mean the holodeck is a universally accepted jerk-off joint? And so what fantasy would Riker unspool? (I think it's the one where holograms of Data and Wesley play scantily-clad French maids to Riker's home-from-the-jungle big-game hunter, but what do I know?)  


121\. Imaginary Friend. Little girl with imaginary friend fools around in botany port. Jean-Luc gets dad-like and says don't make me come down there. But she does and he does. Imaginary playmate is evil (not to mention also an “energy-based light form”). Okay, different enough for the common man.  


122\. I, Borg AKA Free To a Good Home. I love how mechanical men (Data, Hugh) are like kittens in that they intuitively gravitate to those who will take good care of them (Geordi). Plus I got to hand it to Viacom/Paramount: Hugh Borg is a hottie! (Hey, the actor who plays Hugh, Jonathan del Arco, turns up in 2020 Star Trek, and, in real life, he’s a fierce gay activist. Damn! At last!) Plus, gotta say: “I Borg” is a great title.  


123\. The Next Phase. Geordi and Ro die! Aw, too bad! But Life goes on, as Riker plays the trombone. I am not aware of a sexual subtext to the death or the trombone (though it seems as if there should be). Oh, yeah, they don't really die. They just seem dead. You're telling me. And naturally there's Romulans too.  


124\. The Inner Light. The Feel-Good Jean-Luc Movie of the Year! Mainly, Jean-Luc is mysteriously transferred to an unknown planet and meets another woman worthy of him, Aline of Ressika! She thinks they’re married and she loves him! As for Cap, well, he loves her brand of stew. Suspicious JLP (taking a big spoonful): "It's . . . delicious." Aline (dimple, beam, dimple): "You always say that!" Too bad everybody dies in the end, including the toddlers. PeeEssoovius has a buhrilliant moment at the end: he's been brainnapped to live a lifetime on this planet (see, they’re dying but they kidnap JLP so they can install their memories in him. Sob. That way they’ll live forever.) Anyway, he finally snaps out of it and finds himself back where he started from Ye Olde Enterprise with Riker at his knee. The look Sir Pee gives Frakes when he tries to re-orient himself to his changed universe is just . . .so, so [sobsobsob]. . . real. *SIGH* (It's presumptuous for a sub-minion such as my lowly Sunbeam self to suggest this, but I wonder if this episode is an eerie attempt at a valedictory biography of His Royal Highest Hotness King Pstewarty: see, Jean-Luc's life forks in this ep between being Jean-Luc Picard, Captain of the Starfleet Enterprise, and being a devoted husband! And being a devoted husband in a small non-outer-space-y type of place! And being a father of two! And they're a boy and a girl! And the boy subtly goes bald! And in the alternate life, he's a weaver! Of course, before TNG, back in cute little England, Our Man was a devoted husband, father of two, boy and girl, boy went bald. PS's real-life momma was a weaver, too, in the textile mills of Northern England. Oh, to add EVEN MORE to your store of useless knowledge, PS's real-life momma was named Gladys. Elaine Dundy in her fabbyswoonful book "Elvis and Gladys" (best Elvis bio ever) points out that the two greatest sex symbols of the twentieth century had mothers named Gladys, i.e., Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Hmmmm. Hmmmmoooovius. Well, back to reality (maybe). The Man is saying that, yes, he is emphatically choosing to be a part of Starfleet as Jean-Luc Picard, but his former life will always be a part of him. Idn't that sweet! Honestly, PS is just KING OF TNG.)  


125\. Time's Arrow I. Didn't I tell you that Mark Twain character was optimumly irritating! Give us a break, TNG! Still I like Whoopi kinda of swanking about the 1890's, although that other guy doesn't seem very Jack-London-y. (FYI, Jack London was a commie.) Mostly, I hate the bum at the start who gives Data bum hints; clearly a creepy community-theater actor, he generates a whole forcefield of inauthenticity that threatens to topple our whole suspension of disbelief. Oh, yeah, the plot concerns Data's detached head and a race of people genetically kin to Bug-Zappers.


	6. Season 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season6: I fear the end is near.

Season 6  
126\. Times Arrow II: Okay, all the Bug-Zapper people lose. (Time portal, phase discriminator, etc. etc.) I didn’t really follow the whole Data’s-head thingy, because Geordi reattaches the FIVE-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD-HEAD to Data’s current body!!! I feel as if we’ll never know anything real ever again! At any rate, Jean-Luc helps Guinan out when she gets wounded in all the time-travel-frou-frou. He and Whoopi really stir up some smoldering heat, very alluring and attractive as they talk and she rests against him. Jean-Luc has a nice voice, have you ever noticed that? [sweatsweatpantpanteyesoutonstemseyesoutonstems]  


127\. Realm of Fear. "Good evening, I'm Boris Karloff as played by Jean-Luc Picard, and I'd like to welcome you to tonight's episode. It's called “Realm of Fear”, and it's a real THRILLLLLLUH". More Barclay. Barclay's such a nell he doesn't like to ride the transporter, but Starfleet makes him anyway. Okay, tonight while he's being transported, he finds himself in the transporter with a . . . tobacco worm! Then there's plot. But not the plot there oughta be! Yeah, in the plot there oughta be, Barclay calmly disembarks from the transporter. The next day two waiters in Ten Forward discuss the puzzling disappearance of all the lettuce from the salad bar. Barclay’s skin grows strangely shinier over the next week, and he becomes, you know, *wigglier*, just *wigglier*. Then one night Deanna hears a slither at her door. When it whooshes opens, she hears something shout "Counselor Troi, you are MIIIINNNNNE" and sees coming towards her a giant . . . Meanwhile, one of the kids from the schoolroom finds a little tiny creature with a familiar face who keeps saying, "HELP MEEE HELP MEEEE". Alas, in the *real* plot, notice how at the very end, Colm Meaney actually has none-to-little screen time with his alleged "pet" tarantula.  


128\. Man of the People. Great sex scene: Riker goes over to Deanna's room and she answers the door and she's dressed the sluttiest ever! Even down to the visible-under-her-low-cut-top diamond-hard nipples (the only other Star Trek erect nipples I ever saw were in the TNG film Insurrection after Jean-Luc falls in the water, but you probably knew that already). Well, Riker's just tickled pink. Until he spies the hot-looking young ensign sitting on her bed. Who apologizes profusely and scuttles out of there. And then Deanna tells Will to cram it, bozo. Nipples! Boring plot otherwise (guy, well, I don’t know wat he does. He does some things, I guess.) Still: Nipples!  


129\. Relics. Hey, who peed in Geordi's Wheaties?! What a grouch! And towards Scotty! I really do not believe that. I mean I do not believe that Geordi would start bitching over the presence of an engineering genius who'd been stuck in a transporter for seventy-years and wanted a little company. Not Our Geordi. No way. Well, anyway, Scotty does get a hair style for longer than a week! But it's only because he gets stuck in the transporter for seventy-five years! Incidentally, his iron hairdo in this ep reminds me of the three great divisions of Trek. A) Free of Hair Issues: Spock, Jean-Luc, Data, Geordi. B) Out of the Closet with their Hair Issues: Scotty, Deanna, Worf, Chekov. C) Deeply Closeted (and Hence Deeply Troubled by) Hair Issues: Kirk, McCoy, Beverly, Riker. Hey, notice the look JLP gives Scotty when Scotty gets all old and profound and says, "It's like the first time you fall in love. You don't ever love a woman quite like that again." Wonder what Cap's thinking of? [smilegrinhehhehheh] Or WHOM he's thinking of?  


130\. Schisms. Ewoks from the Fifth Dimension capture Riker and Worf and some others and tape measure them. I like to think that they did some erotic probing as well, but the blushing camera turned away. A great scene: Worf gets his hair cut by Mr. Mott, Bolian Barber! It turns out Mr. Mott TOOK TOO MUCH OFF THE TOP last time. Needless to say, one shouldn't do that with a Klingon. (You really need to see this scene.)  


131\. True Q. Boring Q ep. Unheard of! But it's boring mainly because it dooesn't focus on Q or Jean-Luc, but on a teen girl Q who has a crush on Riker. So sad. Well, what do teen girl Qs do? They generate puppies and gazebos and Rikers in ill-fitting top hats (Riker is crucified by that top hat). But our Q, the really truly true Q, has a nice moment or two, once when he hugs Jean-Luc (Jean-Luc feigns indifference ‘cuz Riker's watching). Also, Jean-Luc makes a big Jean-Luc speeches about . . . life or something, and Q is SO exasperated. No one can act as furiously exasperated as John deLancie can. Astonishing.  


132\. Rascals. Now this is a hell of a show. Something happens and Jean-Luc, Ro, Guinan, and Keiko are made into children. Amazing performance by the brilliant Colm Meaney when he realizes that he's married to a twelve-year-old girl. He's. Just. So. Irish. Cringing! Making the sign of the cross! He KNOWS he's going to hell for this one! Rockin! I rather like the young Jean-Luc as well as he tells the Ferengis that Riker's his Number One Dad! What a rascal! You really need to see this one too.  


133\. Fistful of Datas. When this ep first aired, there were mixed reviews from everybody, from everybody but ME, who thinks it is good to the last drop! Holodeck is running a cowboy program for Worf and Alexander and, needless to say, it screws up again, and inserts Data into the program as about seven different cowpokes and one busty lusty saloon-gal who tries to lure Worf into a shoot-out at her O.K. corral! Data the hot drag queen! Does that rule! Then to pile Pelion on Ossa, Deanna turns up smoking cigarillos and wearing the universe's tightest shirt. Wonderful in every way. I know, as a Jean-Luc-y, I seem not to give Brent Spiner as much love as he deserves, but honestly, where is Brent’s NOBEL PRIZE for acting????? He is UHH-MAZING here.  


134\. The Quality of Life. Pouty scientist Ms. Farralon makes these little George Foreman grills that can think. Data weighs the grills' importance in the great scheme of things and inexplicably finds them equal to Jean-Luc. So, when our gang gets get into one of those foolish ST positions where Data alone must choose who lives and who dies, Jean-Luc's goose appears cooked. Mizz Farralon care she nought, and the rest of the crew is . . . diffidently cowed. Honestly. I hope Jean-Luc turns Data over his knee when the cameraman goes out for a smoke.  


135\. Chain of Command, pt. I. This is what they used to call a "booster plot", i.e., not a real plot, but a formative pretext for the next part when JLP lets the ACTING DAWGS OUT! In this part, Bev, Worf, and JLP wear beatnik clothes and visit the Cardassian Rock City. Then JLP gets captured by David Warner and it turns v. serious.  


136\. Chain of Command, pt. II. In the continuation, Jean-Luc plays Leonardo diCaprio to David Warner's (reg. TM) David-Warner-Character, i.e., David Warner ties Jean-Luc's hands above his head and then threatens him. Still, I like David Warner, and then there's a happy ending! Worm-eating alert! Man, Jean-Luc is STARVED! (Actually, this is a very disturbing episode all about man's indomitable spirit, but mostly our attention is drawn to JLP's naked body, so, under the circumstances, man's indomitable spirit pretty much flies out the window.) (Oh, by the way, something about acting with his fellow British hams brings out the fighting best in King P of Stewartville. Maybe it's that competitive thing he sure has got going on. What must it have been like to be all that talented in the nineteen-sixties, yeah, bay-beee, back in the middle of the British Invasion!!! And yet to lack that one overwhelmingly alluring trademark Brit thing: HAIR. PS kicks out the jams here with David Warner – also from the north of England – just as he did back with Jeremy Kemp in ep. 75, “Family”, but nothing compares to his work with fellow Yorkshireman Malcolm McDowell in the movie Generations. When Jean-Luc refuses to give Dr. Soran a rocketship, and Soran starts burbling on about time is the fire in which we burn bla bla bla, look at The Man's face and think about what he's thinking about. Rene. Robert. His face grows paler and more frightened, and he can barely breathe from the grief; then, when Soran finishes nattering, JLP says, "I'll see what I can do," in a strangled emotional voice and basically TAKES NO PRISONERS, ACTING-WISE. Does anyone besides me remember when David Warner and Malcolm McDowell were important British actors? "I'll moptop ye, Ringo-fookin-Starr!"  


137\. Ship in a Bottle. More Moriarty! Yes, the Arkansas Love-Bug Returns! Kind of a Jorge-Luis-Borges moment at the end when Jean-Luc says, "well, what if, say, WE on board the Enterprise here were just a little program in a little box on a little coffee table for the entertainment of unknown giants." And then the camera shuts down, but Jean-Luc goes on saying, "and suppose the script were kinda sorry and focuses on the guest stars instead of the real stars, like me, LordSirBrave Pat Stewartness," and Data peeks around the camera, "or me, Brent Spiner," and here comes Riker, "Or me!" Yeah, and what if the script is lame and everybody's conscious that it's lame: so, if you're conscious that it's lame, well, is it still lame? All too labyrinthine for Saturday night in my opinion. SEX! JUST GIVE US SEX!!!  


138\. Aquiel. The dog did it! The dog did it! And furthermore there's DNA everywhere! You don't really want to know much about this episode, nor is there much to know. I think Geordi gets some, but it's hard to care.  


139\. Face of the Enemy. TNG bows to the demands of Marina's agent and gives her an ep. See, she gets surgically altered into a Romulan and she gets to Romul all over the place. But do you know the real reason this episode is important? [blushblush] Because, because, because, this is the first time Worf wears his . . . PONYTAIL! I had to be sedated when I saw it. Sexy doesn't even begin to describe the effect Worf's new ‘do had on me.  


140\. Tapestry. Jean-Luc In Bed With Q!!!!! Hot Voolyvoo-Q-shay-Avec-Moi Action! Oh, when I saw the slo-mo reveal of Jean-Luc lying in bed with Q, I said, naw, they won't go there. BUT THEY DID. Boring subplot of Jean-Luc's life story, or “the tapestry” of his life (in brief: shacks up with a teenaged girl and makes her miserable; is also revealed to be a coward; listen, dude, we WEAR the CHAINS we FORGED in LIFE). Happy ending, I guess, in that Jean-Luc ends up in the conference room swapping disturbing sex yarns with Riker. I think the real plot is the Pillsbury Act-Off between deLancie and HisHolyActornessPS. Gotta say: Big John wins this one hands-down.  


141\. Birthright I. Data has the cutest dream about Noonian Soong! Who turns out to have been a real dreamboat in his youth. (Those eyes! Those eyes!) There's also a convoluted subplot abut Worf's father, the beautifully monickered Mogh!, and whether or not Mogh Lives! James "I'm a Pig for Love" Cromwell turns up in a thin candy shell of latex makeup to taunt Worf that his father is alive (big Klingon insult: “snarl! Your father's not dead! Ahahahahaha.” *sigh* Those Klingons!) so Worf has to go investigate!  


142\. Birthright II. Seems like Mogh is dead! Seems like Mogh was dead all along! À bientôt, Mogh! Mogh, we hardly knew ye! But it's okay: Worf gets laid by a gal who's half-Klingon and half-Romulan. She sure looks like she has her some bad headaches (IMHO, Worf's way too good for her.) At the end, some pretty Klingon boys come back with Worf to the Enterprise while Riker and Jean-Luc lift their eyebrows. Fresh meat, they seem to say.  


143\. Starship Mine. Jean-Luc wear a hot little outfit. Low cut top. With jodhpurs. And he roams around the ship all on his own except for some pointless bad guys. These are apparently retreads from the same bad guys in "Gambit", episodes 155/156: you know the type, shoelaces in their noses, clothespins for ears, hair made from bicycle chains, 60’s velour upholstery for clothes, crap like that. Jean-Luc defeats them all without even breathing heavy. (Don't worry, Johnny, we'll do the heavy breathing for you.)  


144\. Lessons. Jean-Luc gets some from a woman. This is actually rather less engaging that it seems (although it is a well-meaning ep). Best scene: him and her rehearse some music together in a Jeffries tube and Geordi and Data crawl around trying to find out the source of the music and then the music stops and Geordi and Data shrug. Reason the music stopped: you have to ask! C'mon! Grow up!  


145\. The Chase. Dr. "Chickenhawk" Galen, Jean-Luc's first lover back at Starfleet Academy, comes back to Jean-Luc and expects him to put out. No dice, says Jean-Luc, he has cuter fish to fry (casts a meaningful look at Riker). Chickenhawk goes off in a snit (or is it a shuttlecraft) and conveniently dies. (Elderly guest stars always die.) But meanwhile he leaves Jean-Luc the secret of the universe! Guess what it is! Why, it’s: EveryONE is BeeYOUtifullll in THEIR Own WAY!!!! How cool is that! Poor old Jean-Luc has to explain that to a fun group consisting of Cardassians, Romulans, and Klingons. :) Still, I like the Cardassian babe's pigtails; with her scales, she looks the way Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz would look if the flying monkeys had gotten ahold of her.  


146\. Frame of Mind. New Adventures In Riker's Hair! Tonight introduces the Fork-in-a-Toaster/Troll-Doll tonsorial cascade. There's also a confused plot: Riker is immured in an insane asylum by a McDonald's Arches-faced race of people who don't believe him when he says, "I Don't Belong Here!" It's that old What-Is-Reality thing again. "Here," TPTB say, "you people at home are watching, YOU decide what's going on!" I mean, why do we even PAY these people?  


147\. Suspicions. Uhoh, big PLOT ep. Bev quits Starfleet. "I hate them! I hate them!" she says as she throws herself on her bed; Whoopi's there, so they harmonize on "A Thousand Stars in the Sky" (as made famous by Kathy Young and the Innocents), and then they go to the mall to get their ears pierced and, wait, no, I'm confused by Bev's total teen petulance! That's not what happens at all! Actually, see, there's a Ferengi and he dies and he's murdered and Bev has her "Suspicions" (heheheh) about it, and she's either right or wrong, I forget which. Attractive alien with gila-monster skin is lurking about, so that has a certain charm.  


148\. Rightful Heir. Well, Kahless comes back from the dead, and all the Klingons are pretty impressed. Not that it's hard to impress Klingons; they are hardly a reticent race. Wonder what the average Klingon blood pressure is? Eight billion over seven hundred thousand? Hey, what is it the preacher says about the little no-neck monsters who throw buttered biscuits at Maggie in Cat On a Hot Tin Roof? "My goodness, these kiddies are SO full of vitality." Same goes for Klingons.  


149\. Second Chances. Okay, bitch, get on your knees and admit you love Riker. And now there's two of them! Seems there was a time when Riker got doubled in a transporter accident in some cave, and they've just found out about it. New Riker is cuter than Old Riker (and hotter too: he molests the squealing Deanna on the holodeck!) New Riker is also rather more . . . gutsy than Old Riker: he goes off and joins the Maquis (which leads to one of the more mystifying DS9's where Old Riker visits DS9 and insults Miles who cowers from him – why? – and then kidnaps Kira and it turns out it's not Old Riker, but New Riker, and then he French-kisses Kira and gets sent to a Cardassian prison camp for life. And that's it. Most of us reading this are okay with the prison camp thing – no smut like prison camp smut – but it is odd to just . . . leave New Riker's story like that. I suspect the evil hand of Ira Steven Squeaktoy in all of this; the relentless message one gets while doing one's homework is how much Ira Steven Badguy HATES TNG. Hey, remember Bashir's buddy, the surgically-enhanced fat old bald mutant insecure named . . . guess what? Patrick: yeah, wonder what THAT was all about. What an asshole. Ira Steven Frostyheart has no fan in me.) (Well, my opinion changed a weensy bit after seeing Tobias Menzies on “Outlander”, Ira Steven and Ron Moore’s 21st century show. Oh, my God, if I had seen “Outlander” Season 1, Episode 16, “To Ransom a Man’s Soul”, in 1991, I would have just, you know . . . turned into a PILLAR OF SALT! AT THE LEAST!)  


150\. Timescape. Deanna loses a moment whle Data is discussing a conference he went to. What's her problem? This used to happen to me at faculty meetings all the time! Then Jean-Luc sticks his fingertips into a time-warp fiendish-thingy and his nails grow superfast and he does a double take from the classic 1921 horror movie Nosferatru. That's a kinda cool second. Later, Jean-Luc goes nuts and draws a smiley face in the warp core. Also: great Slimer-colored frozen phasar blasts to Bev's chest. And there's Romulans! (Grrr!) Still: nothing seems to happen. Unless you count Data and Geordi “modifying a set of emergency transport armbands to nullify the temporal effect.” Yeah, that.  


151\. Descent I. One of them end-of-the-season cliffhangers that TPTB are so fond of. The first half is breathtaking: Alexander Singer, who directs this episode, is a genius! The scene where Crosis the Borg seduces Data into deciding to kill Geordi is flat-out brilliant beyond words. Brent Spiner rules! And even the camera is in on the act! (I told you I often overlook Brent Spiner when blinded – as I am – by Jean-Luc Picard, but he is tender and tough and committed and funny and everything a man oughta be, even if he is an android. Geordi is so lucky!)


	7. Season 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tears and more tears falling down my face.

Season 7  


152\. Descent II. The second half isn't so cool. A) Crosis has no lines. (Still, we love you, Crosis, oh, yes, we do!) B) Data doesn't even try to kill Geordi. And it turns out that it’s all just a subspace thingamabob. Lore doesn't even get to get it on with Deanna as he does in the overprized bookitization, and overall it's a very languid revolutionary takeover. (Not trying to judge the past, but I must say TPTB pulled a LOT of punches in their day.)  


153\. Liaisons. Okay, see, there are these guys and they're Iyaarans and there's three of them and they come on board the Enterprise and one is mean and one is stupid and one is weird, and the weird one and Jean-Luc go off in a little rocket and wreck on a little planet and the weird one "dies" and Jean-Luc is captured by a woman who also wrecked on the little planet ten years ago and, since Jean-Luc is the first man she's seen in ages, as in Stephen King’s “Misery,” she falls in love with JLP! (Surprise surprise.) But he's not in love with her, even though he's stuck there and she's nice if a little unsophisticated and she throws herself at him repeatedly and kisses him but JLP is just ever so funny about it, and anyway after about twenty minutes of pure plot, it turns out that she is really the weird Iyaaran in disguise who’s pretending to be the lonely woman so he can find out what love is. Huh? The stupid one, meanwhile, is learning about pleasure (mostly ice cream) from Deanna (c’mon, man! Who needs to learn “ice cream”) and the mean one is learning about manners from Worf. See, that's their thing! Learning vicariously from others! What great neighbors! Oh, notice how, when Jean-Luc says goodbye to "his" Iyaaran (remember: the one he kissed), he is pink-cheeked with the oddest exhilaration. Dude! Only PS could turn in this twisty performance.  


154\. Interface. You know how I got turned on to Star Trek? See, I used to think I was too damn good for television, but one day I was idly getting ready for class and I was talking to this woman I used to work with and I told her I was getting ready to show one of our audiovisuals (instead of doing, you know, actual work) and she said which audiovisual and I said that BBC production of "Oedipus Rex" and she said, "did you know that the actor who played Oedipus was just elected Most Bodacious Actor in the World by TV Guide and his name is Yahweh Stewartness." I said, "you mean, Oedipus lives Outside of the AV Department?" And, from that moment on, I was a sucker for JLP's brand of love. Well, actually in my work-life, there was another great AV/”TNG” mashup: in our AV of the Richard Wright story "Almos'a Man," LeVar plays the lead and his momma is played by Madge Sinclair, as in this episode!! Cool! See, I'm not REALLY watching teevee! I'm doin' research! (And, as in this episode, let’s face it, just like Geordi, I was exposed to “unhealthy levels of neural stimulation” by TNG, which is why I am what I am today).  


155 & 156\. Gambit I & II. Okay, everybody thinks Jean-Luc is dead, but he isn't really; he's just wearing a low-cut jerkin and a weird neck implant while aboard a pirate spaceship led by leonine sodomite Arctus Baran. Then the pirates also get Riker and Riker is relieved to see Jean-Luc in a really slashy way and Jean-Luc says "ditto moi" and there's lots of pseudo-butch seething between Jean-Luc and Arctus over Riker's charms and there's also some sort of subplot involving the Los Angeles Lakers and Klingon hygiene tours and also there's a weapon and a Romulan gal and finally Data and Jean-Luc slashily accompany Riker to the brig in the last scene. I must observe that, even though they find out Jean-Luc is "dead" in the first scene, Bev is strangely chipper for the longest time.  


157\. Phantasms. Data is dreaming: Crusher takes a straw and sucks Riker's brains! Deanna is made into a cake and Worf eats it or, er, her! There’s an astonishingly oral quality to Data's nightmares. Hey, that Freud on the holodeck sure doesn't look very Freudian to me. Bottom line: it's body lice from outer space! Oh, yes, Data gets a knife and attacks Deanna in a turbolift. And yet, and yet, and yet nothing seems to happen!  


158\. Dark Page – Well now, this is truly weird. Okay, Kristen Dunst is in it. That's one thing. Lwaxana drowns a hitherto-unknown-to-us older sister to Deanna in the holodeck. That's another thing. Then there’s Kristen Dunst's father who is played by actor Norman Large. Hey, did you all see "The Big Lebowski"? It is something of a cliche to like Coen Brothers movies, but they are awfully good. In "The Big Lebowski", there’s a (fictive) porn actor named Karl Hungus. Karl Hungus! Fabulous porn name! Well, I think Norman Large is a fab porn star name too! By the way, I love Kristen Dunst and everything she’s ever done: from the forlorn vampirette in “Interview with a Vampire” to “Marie Antoinette” (yum!) to that tough tough young miss in TV’s “Fargo” and beyond!  


159\. Attached: Scowllllllllllllll. Very unrealistic. I mean, suppose you were telepathically attached to your man? What would he hear you thinking? "Look at how that goon drives: John Milton could handle a car better than he does! Plus that haircut!!! Is he up for the Orangutan-of-the-Year award!!” On the other hand, when Jean-Luc and Bev are telepathically attached (thanks to a race of cranky aliens and their weird machinations), it's "Jean-Luc, I didn't know you cared" and "Bev, how long have you felt this way", etc. etc. And they don't even shack up. Although they come THIS CLOSE. I must say, however, that JLP and Bev are much cuter than my man and me. And Jean-Luc deserves canonization; he carefully does not think of Wesley.  


160\. Force of Nature. Years have passed since this episode and people are still bored!!!! Its boringness is, even as we speak, being broadcast throughout all the solar systems so people on other planets can be bored! It does feature a couple of scientists who are brother and sister, and very close. I guess they're the Roderick and Madeline Usher of outer space, but even THEY don't ignite this sleepy ep. Turns out warp speed is bad. Tralalala. Oh, this is the ep where Data and Geordi are poised sexily in the Jeffries tube and Data says (one of my favorite lines ever): "Geordi, I could not stun my cat." With all the meaning in the world. He is so ineffably precious at that moment that I can't think why Geordi doesn't grab him and paw at his Starfleet trousers until Ol' Fully Functional is naked from the waist down and then Geordi plunges into him again and again. See, that way this ep wouldn't be so boring! (Still, hats off to TPTB. They rope up intergalactic climate change AND make it matter!)  


161\. Inheritance – so it’s time for Data's Mother. Fionnula Flanagan plays Data's flesh-mother, the consort of Dr. Noonian Soong. Turns out (Calling Rod Serling! Calling Rod Serling!) she's a robot too, but she just doesn't know it! Fionnula Flanagan is a hot momma from way back; in the sixties, she was on off-Broadway as Molly Bloom and bared her bazooms in the soliloquy scene. Overbearingly cheerful (but mostly overbearing) as most professional hot mommas tend to be, Data's mom talks a lot about Data as a "child" and how he ran around naked. Seems like naked Data was an issue in "The Most Toys" too, along with naked Lwaxana (remember how we are always being threatened with Lwaxana stripping off her clothes.) That's an interesting reveal of the TPTB's anti-sex phobia; comic characters are always being given rococo sex lives or having their clothes torn off (ala Quark in DS9). As if only the lowly can be sexualized while The Good Guys are Too Good to Strip. Fucking Paramount Puritans. (Fionnula was also a hearty old dame on “Lost”! More on “Lost”/ST:TNG in a few minutes!)  


162\. Parallel. Bunch of parallel universes converse all at once. AwRITE!!! Buncha different Worfs, especially. Some of whom are shacking up with Deanna, some of whom aren't. Something new: a diffident Klingon! Happy ending. And we get to see what would happen if Jean-Luc had stayed in his Locutus drag: Riker's beard goes all fuzzy. Frankly, I had expected better than that.  


163\. The Pegasus. This other bald guy who outranks our bald guy comes on board and hangs around Riker in a slashy dom way and making all kinds of insinuations. His first words: “Will, I bet you never thought you’d see me again”, a favorite line amongst blackmailers everywhere! Listen, this guy even claims that he has a "wife". Oh, I'm so sure. Hey, did anybody see "Waiting for Guffman"? Remember Corky's "wife"? Ha ha ha. Lots of rank-pulling and pseudo-butch seething over Riker's (dubious) charms! Then they all get caught in a Styrofoam asteroid and have to use an illicit cloaking device to escape (see, all these years Riker had been in on the earliest Starfleet use of a cloaking device, but he didn't know it UNTIL HE READ THIS WEEK'S SCRIPT!!) and there's more butch seething and Jean-Luc and Riker hang around the brig again in a slashy manner. This ep takes its slash-worthy Mary-Renault-y title from the name of the starship the Other Bald Guy drove. Now, Sis, you and I both know that Other Bald Guy was played by the enigmatic Terry O’Quinn of “Lost” fame (our second “Lost” person) Anyways, Terry does a damn good job here -- as he did on “Lost”-- of suggesting molestation was afoot. Say no more, nudge nudge, wink wink. (Hey! Even more BTW! This ep starts with the fan-favorite Captain Picard Day!!!!!! To paraphrase Elvis, I wish everyDAY could be CAPTAIN PICARD DAY!)  


164\. Homeward. This ep is pretty cool for several reasons: for one thing, Dorn has to wear much less makeup than usual and we can see the beeyoutiful Dornface: man, it's worth the wait! Also, there's a little guy who's kinda cute: he plays a villager, see, in the village that Worf's human adopted brother (played by Paul Sorvino) has colonized, only Paul the human adopted brother is feigning not being human. Whew! Little guy accidentally gets aboard the Enterprise (long story) and sees (against Prime Directive) that he's . . . oh shit who cares. Too Much Plot! Give us sex! Anyway, after a while, Bev waltzes on: "Oh, little cute guy, well, he, uh, committed suicide, that's right, he committed suicide! It was really sad. Just suicided right over. Sad, but convenient, really." Ben Sisko's sweetie also turns up, only here she's married to the adopted human brother. A listless ep, maybe because it was filmed during the time that Paul Sorvino's daughter Mira was dating Quentin Tarantino. A fact which would make me also rather listless too. (The truth is, Paul Sorvino is too old and, face it, TOO Paul Sorvino to play Michael Dorn’s brother, adopted or not.)  


165\. Sub Rosa. Wherein Bev puts on her nightie and writhes around. A fairly hot ep, all things considered. See, there's a sex candle that generations of le famille Howard (Bev’s maiden name) have been addicted to (long story) and now it’s Bev’s turn to get addicted so she quits Starfleet and there's this scene in a graveyard and (a nice moment) Ptewrt Satrick rolls his eyes and is lightly ironic about her family (a very true moment, he's snarky in the way we're all snarky to the people we work with). The sex scenes are, by and large, pretty unbelievably graphic. (I HEART GATES! Notice how she handles her sexual frustration towards JLP versus how Majel handles it. Majel and Gates are the Goofus and Gallant, respectively, of JLP-related sexual frustration). There’s some arga warga about how Bev is destroying the ship so she can be with her sex candle who is personified as a guy named Ronin. According to Wikipedia, “Troi tells Picard that Ronin is a very strange man.” Listen to me, Deanna, [slap slap] you had ONE Betazoid job and you . . .  


166\. Lower Decks. Featuring characters who aren't on the senior staff. Including a very scary Bajoran Mary Sue. As a matter of fact, the whole ep focuses on these losers. Damn! Who cares! Where's the only character that matters: I want my JLP!!! Still, look at this way: four brand new pieces of sexflesh on the Enterprise. Notice the looks everybody gives everybody else. It's like a John Rechy novel! Bev and nurse. Geordi and the slick little Vulcan. Flabby white guy and Riker. And the scary Bajoran Mary Sue with Picard and Worf! "I could eat you alive," the alarming curve of her mouth seems to say. (For you “Terror” fans out there, wouldn’t it be nice if the Lower Decks were the same thing as the Orlop deck where all the beer-and-skittles feeding-frenzies take place? Just saying.)  


167\. Thine Own Self. Wherein Data wears tights. And, while wearing tights, he also gets buried alive! TPTB don't show him getting dug up! They don't show Jean-Luc and them opening up the coffin! They just kind of beam Data up off camera. What a rip off!!! And not only do they blow that teeny inexpensive moment, but they blow the whole ep basically: see, there's about forty seconds where Data is beamed down to a medievally kind of planet, but he has android-related amnesia and he doesn't know who he is and he staggers around (with the most beautifully mussed hair ever) and a little girl befriends him and then the other people on the planet think he's a mechanical man and it’s about five seconds away from turning in FRANKENSTEIN! Which would just be the coolest Star Trek: TNG episode EVER but then TPTB screw up horribly and the episode itself gets buried alive. *sigh*  


168\. Masks. A much criticized ep that I, ole Sunbeam, like a lot: No sex, alas, or if there is . . . (Data changes genders, but not much follows from that). Still there's this whole mythic sun and moon, man and woman, Jean-Luc and Data thing, and they get to wear ugly little masks, and Data has split personalities, and it's all just the most wonderful Orson-Welles-Presents-The-Spirit-of-Man-Awards-With-Ugly-Little-Giacommeti-Sculptures-of-A-Man-Striding-As-The-Award thing imaginable. *Very* 1961! (Dammit, it’s a GREAT episode!)  


169\. Eye of the Beholder. Turns out EVEN THE ACTORS didn't know what was real and what was fantasy in this episode. Boo Hoo! I like the glassy-eyed murderer though; good casting! (he’s played by continually employed character actor, Mark Rolston. I must say, I don’t love nothin the way I love continually employed character actors. I mean, oh, yes, nobody outshines our megastar Sir Pee, not even the sun, etc. etc., but character actors -- like, say, Strother Martin or Shea Wigham -- also bring a lot to the party.) BTW, we ALL (including Dorn and Marina) shoulda figured out that something was wrong when Deanna wakes up after a night spent in passionate love-making with Worf and nothing's mussed, I mean NOTHING. She just stretches out on the perfectly groomed sheets like a gal in a fabric softener commercial and croons, "It's Klingon Fresh! [TM]"  


170\. Genesis. Oh my god oh my god oh my god. Hey, this is a great episode: see, loser Barclay does something and this virus that causes everyone to DE-EVOLVE gets loose. Worf de-evolves into a great horned beast and Riker (in an extremely amusing turn) becomes an ape and Deanna is a fish; oh, yeah, Barclay turns into a spider. So many great scenes! And, see, Jean-Luc and Data have been at the drive-in movies in a shuttlecraft (passionately necking, I like to think, although canon does not support this) but, when they get back, the Enterprise is all dark and full of jungle squeaks (fabulous moment!) As they walk around, Data, of course, doesn't get the virus, but Jean-Luc does and starts (brilliantly) to de-evolve into a LEMUR!!! Data is SO unsympathetic, but he does discover a cure (snoresnore). The only way to get the cure to everybody (this is slightly baffling) is to sidetrack Great Horned Beast Worf who's wandering around killing things, and so Data has to boil up some of Deanna's pheronomes and then he tells Jean-Luc to waft them about, thus sidetracking Worf who will hence want to mate with Deanna. Umm, wait a minute! If Jean-Luc the Lemur-to-be has the pheronomes, won't Great Horned Beast want to get busy with the one with the pheronomes, i.e., Jean-Luc himself? Since canon does not indicate otherwise, apparently so. And there is a most exciting scene where Hot-to-Trot GHB Worf chases Lemur JLP through the Jeffries tube. (Alas, TPTB fail to show where the Beast catches the Lemur and ... it happens: love at first lunge! It's obvious both PatrickHimStewartShip the Great and Michael Dorn are in on the joke. His PS-ness – Yes, He Who was Shylock, He Who Portrayed Leontes – has to mime throwing invisible pheronomes into the air from an invisible basket. Pretty cute!) But still: Suppose you were watching this with your kiddies? "Mommy, Mommy, what's Worf want to do with Jean-Luc?" What COULD you say?  


171\. Journey's End. Wesley finally runs off with Traveler for good. For Bev it's grief, but to us it's a big relief. Not one word of the script seems to have any connection to the next. Even Sir Pee Ess seems a little daunted by the rainbow phantasmagoria of syllables. Most suggestive moment: Wes looks eerily USED.  


172\. First Born. Wow! I didn't know Klingons had Renaissance Faires! And yet they do. Worf even takes Alexander to one where a creepy older man picks Alex up! Then B'Etor, Lursa, and Quark put in an appearance! Curiouser and curiouser! This is one of those Character-From-the-Future stories, and Alexander's pick-up is not The Man From NAMBLA but actually the older Alexander himself. Then it gets more confusing. Might be a happy ending. Might not. (But James Sloyan, whom I like very much, plays future Alexander, so that’s nice. James was the Romulan game show host back in episode 57, as you surely recall. )  


173\. Bloodlines. AKA Jean-Luc's Partial Son. A Ferengi for Ferengi reasons conjures up a plausible youth to play Jean-Luc's son. His name is Jason Vigo and, of course, he isn't really Jean-Luc’s son (although quite cute with beautiful dark set eyes), but you have to sift through a great deal of plot before you get to that point. Most Interesting Fact: listen carefully – the actor playing Jason Vigo has a SOUTHERN accent. Weird! Also: another glimpse in Jean-Luc's past as Starfleet Manwhore, something Beverly, Q, and I are most uncomfortable with.  


174\. Emergence: The Train One. Lotta people don't like this one, primarily because *nothing* happens. David Huddleston, the bad guy from The Big Lebowski (well, ONE of the bad guys from The Big Lebowski) is in it. A very abstract ep is all. Dadaesque, as if they'd cut up thirty two freelance scripts and then drawn random lines out of a hat and hoped for a plot. Nothing happens. Or I'm pretty sure nothing happens. (If you don’t believe Big Miss Sunbeam, I invite you to read the Wikipedia entry on this episode; then back to your desks.)  


175\. Preemptive Strike The beeyoutiful Michelle Forbes comes back one last time. Oh, listen, Riker has to disguise himself as a Bajoran. I want everybody to think about all of Riker's disguises: on the Angel One planet, or as a Mintaken, or the time when he was a Malcorian. Notice that these are the most inept "disguises" in Federation history. He'd do better just putting a sheet over his head and saying ‘boo!' Well, anyways, Michelle's fed up with Starfleet and is going to join the Maquis; she goes underground, and Jean-Luc follows her. V. sexy scene where she pretends she's a prostitute and he pretends he's her customer: "Listen here, Ro, don't do me wrong; gimme that thing you're sitting on," he says, quoting Leon Redbone. ONE HOT SCENE. (Hey, wait a minute, what's JLP doing with his LEFT HAND all through that scene?)  


176\. All Good Things. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Bring ‘em back! Bring ‘em all back! Bring back the Pakleds and Kivas Fajo and Dr. Farralon and the Jaradan flea folk and Nick Dirgo and Admiral Chestcold and, and, and, the Romulan who looked like Soupy Sales! Everybody!! Don't leave us, TNG!!!!!! SOBBBBBB!!! Well, it was a great run and this was a great goodbye. Jean-Luc loses his mind in the future and starts wearing women's hats and then he slips into the present and runs barefoot around the Enterprise wearing nothing but a teeny weeny fuzzy bathrobe (thank you, Internet, for pointing out his provocative garb) and then he goes back to the past with Q where everybody is tiny ugly amoebas and then it's back to the future and he's divorced from a mean-looking Bev and Deanna's dead and Worf (is this not so Worf? Is this not the Worfest?) is the only one who's grown in character and he misses Deanna and Riker has gray hair and he's turned into one of the innumerable horde of men who look like the late Kenny Rogers. Whew! Hey, Miles is there! So's Tasha! And . . .[breakdowncrycry] a life without TNG is NOT WORTH LIVING!!!  


________________________________________  
I was not alone in my sad adieu: I was living in the University ghetto of Tuscaloosa, Alabama when I was watching these eps, which, because of their being syndicated, were shown on this local little teeny tiny rat “network”. At unpredictable times, the tiny rat network would have some sort of mood swing and CANCEL ST:TNG so they could show a pro basketball game. Well, sir, the night this last, final, good-bye-my-lovely episode was supposed to air (at this time the frenzy over ST:TNG was at its highest pitch; we were mad for it), the stupid rat network decided to run a game instead of this, our sole remaining LAST episode. Do you remember the scene in “The Ten Commandments” when the eldest son in each Egyptian family has to die for some weird Old Testament reason and you could hear all the mothers wailing from up and down the stone street? That’s exactly what happened on my street. Everywhere were wails and screams and doors slammed and oaths uttered. We were speechless and inconsolable. A basketball game? A stupid stupid basketball game? I heard the outcries of the street and wept with them.


End file.
